This article will give you a quick list of 20 HSC Common Module Short Answer Questions to boost your exam preparation!
After getting a Band 6 all 4 HSC English units, I’ve tutored students like yourself for 200+ hours. I know how hard it is to come up with analysis on the spot to texts you’ve never even seen before, but I also know how to help you break down those unfamiliar texts.
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1. Band 6 Structure for HSC Short Answers
2. Exemplar Common Module Short Answer Response
3. 20 Common Module Short Answer Questions
4. Downloadable HSC English Paper 1
Band 6 Structure for HSC Short Answers
Step 1: Begin by thoroughly understanding the HSC common module question. What is the key verb? Are there any key themes, characters or ideas mentioned?
Step 2: Formulate a focused thesis statement that directly addresses the question.
Step 3: Utlise specific textual evidence to demonstrate a nuanced understanding of the content, aligning with key syllabus outcomes. Note: these could be visual or literary techniques.
Step 4: Critically engage with the text, providing insightful interpretations and exploring different layers of meaning.
Step 5: Proofread meticulously to eliminate errors, ensuring a refined response that meets the expectations of the HSC common module.
| Topic Sentence | This should answer the question in a direct and precise way, taking up 1-2 lines on the page. A general template to follow is: [Author] represents [human experience] as [main point that encapsulates a key theme within your chosen quotes]. E.g. Skrzynecki represents the migrant experience as disorienting on an external and internal level in forcing the individual to adapt to an unfamiliar environment whilst processing trauma. |
| Quote Analysis | While in an essay you would elaborate a bit on the author’s perspective before introducing your quote, this is not required for short answers as you’re responding to an unseen text without any prior knowledge. The short answer section is designed to test your ability to recognise language techniques on the spot and identify how they represent key themes and ideas. So, essentially, you can jump into your quote in the line after your thesis and start analysing language techniques. E.g. Smith metaphorically represents his volatile dynamic with his wife by comparing their relationship to a “flash flood.” |
| Thematic Analysis | Thematic analysis is where you link back to your topic sentence by explaining how the effect of the language techniques portrays something deeper about the human experience. Here’s an example building off the quote analysis from earlier: Smith metaphorically represents his volatile dynamic with his wife by comparing their relationship to a “flash flood,” thus portraying how marriage involves both deep affection and exacerbation with each other’s flaws. Here, you can see the thematic analysis builds off the language technique by presenting a relevant insight about the human experience of marriage. |
| Concluding Sentence | Your concluding sentence should just be a short recap of the point you presented in your topic sentence. For example, reframing the topic sentence from before as a concluding sentence would look like this: Ultimately, Skrzynecki highlights the migrant experience as a struggle between adjusting to an unfamiliar world and confronting personal upheaval. |
Exemplar Common Module Short Answer
To give you an idea of how this comes together, here’s an exemplar response to the question ‘How does Allen represent an experience of connection within families?’ (4 marks). This response is 208 words. For 4 mark questions, students typically write between 150-250 words.
Here’s sample NESA criteria to give you an idea of how a response would be marked:
| Criteria | Marks |
|---|---|
| Explains skilfully how different aspects of the experience of connection within families are represented in the text, including well-chosen supporting evidence from the text. | 4 |
| Explains effectively how different aspects of the experience of connection within families are represented in the text, including supporting evidence from the text. | 3 |
| Explains how different aspects of the experience of connection within families are represented in the text, including some supporting evidence from the text. | 2 |
| Demonstrates limited understanding of how the experience of connection within families is represented in the text. | 1 |
20 Common Module Short Answer Questions
Question #1: How does Allen represent an experience of connection within families? (4 marks)
Family Snapshots
Having satisfied the immediate requirements,
kisses,
hymns,
photos of the bride and groom,
we arm ourselves with champagne glasses
and hunt out the more obscure things.
I find that my grandmother’s ankles
strongly resemble mine,
I find glimpses of my cousin’s father,
who wasn’t invited,
but snuck into the programme as a middle name.
Buried right at the back of one lady’s mind
I find black and white photos
of my father as a child
before he grew up
and died
to be searched for
while my cheeks get sore from smiling.
Everyone searches everyone
for significant absences
or tears or looks
until
we fall down at last
among the pieces of wedding cake
and half-hearted handfuls of confetti.
Tired and bloated with the past
I think someone may have found
fragments of someone in me
but when I checked the mirror
later
I found only myself.
– Elizabeth Allen
Question #2: Explain how the contrast with these images represents the evolutionary nature of human experience? (4 marks)
Question #3: Compare how Text 1 and Text 2 evoke the experience of childhood memories. (7 marks)
Text 1
The Sleepout
Childhood sleeps in a verandah room
In an iron bed close to the wall
Where the winter over the railing
Swelled the blind on its timber boom
And splinters picked lint off warm linen
And the stars were out over the hill;
Then one wall of the room was forest
And all things in there were to come.
Breathings climbed up on the verandah
When dark cattle rubbed at the corner
And sometimes dim towering rain stood
For forest, and the dry cave hung woollen.
Inside the forest was lamplit
Along tracks to a starry creek bed
And beyond lay the never-fenced country,
Its full billabongs all surrounded.
By animals and birds, in loud crustings,
And sometimes kept leaping up amongst them.
And out there, to kindle whenever
Dark found it, hung the daylight moon.
– Les Murray
Text 2
I pulled up into the driveway, observing the way they had built out on the mid-seventies architecture. I had forgotten that the bricks of the house were chocolate brown. The new people had made my mother’s tiny balcony into a two-storey sunroom. I stared at the house, remembering less than I had expected about my teenage years: no good times, no bad times. I’d lived in that place, for a while, as a teenager. It didn’t seem to be any part of who I was now. I backed the car out of their driveway. . . . The little country lane of my childhood had become a black tarmac road that swerved as a buffer between two sprawling housing estates. I drove further down it, away from the town, which was not the way I should have been travelling, and it felt good. The slick black road became narrower, windier, became the single-lane track I remembered from my childhood, became packed earth and knobbly, bone-like flints.
Soon I was driving slowly, bumpily, down a narrow lane with brambles and briar roses on each side, wherever the edge was not a stand of hazels or a wild hedgerow. It felt like I had driven back in time. I remembered it before I turned the corner and saw it, in all its dilapidated red-brick glory: the Hempstocks’ farmhouse. It took me by surprise, although that was where the lane had always ended. I could have gone no further. I parked the car at the side of the farmyard. I had no plan. I wondered whether, after all these years, there was anyone still living there, or, more precisely, if the Hempstocks were still living there. It seemed unlikely, but then, from what little I remembered, they had been unlikely people. The stench of cow muck struck me as I got out of the car, and I walked gingerly across the small yard to the front door. I looked for a doorbell, in vain, and then I knocked. The door had not been latched properly, and it swung gently open as I rapped it with my knuckles. I had been here, hadn’t I, a long time ago? I was sure I had. Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane – Neil Gaiman
Question #4: Explain how imagery is used to convey the emotions arising from human experiences. (5 marks)
LIFE, believe, is not a dream
So dark as sages say;
Oft a little morning rain
Foretells a pleasant day.
Sometimes there are clouds of gloom,
But these are transient all;
If the shower will make the roses bloom,
O why lament its fall ?
Rapidly, merrily,
Life’s sunny hours flit by,
Gratefully, cheerily,
Enjoy them as they fly!
What though Death at times steps in
And calls our Best away?
What though sorrow seems to win,
O’er hope, a heavy sway?
Yet hope again elastic springs,
Unconquered, though she fell;
Still buoyant are her golden wings,
Still strong to bear us well.
Manfully, fearlessly,
The day of trial bear,
For gloriously, victoriously,
Can courage quell despair !
– Charlotte Brontë
Question #5: Explain how the poster illustrates a collective human experience. (3 marks)
Question #6: Explain how Patrick Haas employs metaphor to evoke the experience of despair. (4 marks)
Laurel finds me at the bar, again. She ignores the bartender and doesn’t sit down. She takes an ice cube from my drink and sets it on the table. “Before this melts,” she says, “you have to decide how it’s gonna be.”
I tell her that water freezes when its temperature drops below zero degrees Celsius. The molecules slow down and bond together. The density of the bonds keeps ice afloat in liquids.
“The kids are in the car, you son-of-a-bitch,” she says and grabs my collar.
When things get too heated, I continue, or there’s too much pressure, the molecules move faster, the bonds break, and gaps form when melting begins.
“This is your last chance.”
And once that begins, I say, as water forms around the base of the ice cube until it looks like it’s drowning in itself and she runs out of the door with the keys jingling in her hand —
there’s not a whole hell-of-a-lot that I can do about it.
– Patrick Haas
Question #7: How are poetic devices used to convey a human experience? (4 marks)
The Letter
How it sits in his hands.
“Who’s it from?”
Her son looks away.
“Susan.”
Su-san.
A girl’s name.
An Australian girl is writing to her son.
The coffeeshop patrons grow quiet.
Fat sizzles in the restaurant’s woks, upstairs.
Traffic roars round the corner.
Questions,
as if he is suddenly a stranger,
as if he has come from a far-away place,
sat down in strange clothes, demanding a coffee.
Someone strange has come in and sat down in their coffeeshop.
There! Her breath in the words of the letter.
A glimpse of the handwriting—
round, neat letters.
A faint outline of a person is starting to form.
His mother thinks of how words
Flow out of a body and carry the ghost
of fingers, a face, a heart.
She thinks of the words that have etched themselves
on the walls of her life: I surrender,
We are at war; the words that weigh heavily
on her tongue as she stands and watches
the face of her son: I love you, Come home.
Come Home.
But she cannot hold him, how quickly he slips from her gaze
to those words on the page
that are taking him away,
to a place she has no name for.
– Miriam Lo
Question #8: Explain how the writer conveys the emotions of the character. (4 marks)
After about a year together she realized that loving him was not good for her but it took another year for her to end it and now she was very glad that it was over.
Sometimes she wondered how she had allowed it to go on for such a long time.
I will be very careful the next time I fall in love, she told herself. Also, she had made a promise to herself that she intended on keeping. She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. They weren’t worth it in the long run. They were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was complicated. They were like having a vacuum cleaner around the house that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it.
She wanted her next lover to be a broom.
– Richard Brautigan
Question #9: How does Dylan Gittoes use language devices to show his view of the experience? (3 marks)
While returning by bus to England from the Black Forest in the south of Germany via
Paris, I am travelling on a night bus, and as usual, we’ve pulled into a large roadside petrol station to refuel. This stop is on the outskirts of a small city called Metz
in France, just over the border from Germany, in a region called Lorraine. I hear the familiar hiss of the front doors open. “30 minutes,” says the driver in his gruff voice with typical German efficiency. Like lemmings, we all file down the aisle of the bus and head into
the night. The cold air hits me like a slap in the face, my breath instantly becoming a
fog. I shiver and pull up my hood stepping into the light rain, the warm glow from the
service station beckoning us like moths to a flame.
Inside is a cafeteria like the ones you see at Ikea. I grab a plastic tray and place it on the
rail that is designed to slide along as you pass each food item to choose from. First up
is a watery grey soup with some sort of bread-like dumplings floating on top. Pass. Next
is some dry pasta lightly covered with what looks like tinned corned beef. Pass. Next is
potatoes in a heavy buttery cream. Pass. Next, I see there is an empty tray and lastly is
dessert, some fluorescent green and bright red jelly in plastic cups with cream on top. I
gulp, disheartened. I think to myself, I can’t eat any of that, can I? Then, like an angel
from heaven, I see my saving grace. She’s heading towards the empty tray- an elderly
lady in a hairnet carrying a tray of what looks like freshly baked Quiche Lorraine!
“Merci mademoiselle,” I say cheekily as I grab two serves, which elicits a quick smile.
I pay, and when I sit down to eat the flaky crust with soft cheesy goodness, I’m suddenly
full of gratitude, as I realise I had just found the diamond in the rough.
– Dylan Gittoes
Question #10: Analyse how the poem represents the importance of a personal connection to place in the individual human experience. (4 marks)
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
– William Butler Yeats
Question #11: Explain how the migrant experience is represented in this poem. (4 marks)
Migrant hostel
No one kept count
Of all the comings and goings –
Arrivals of newcomers
In busloads from the station,
Sudden departures from adjoining blocks
That left us wondering
Who would be coming next.
Nationalities sought
Each other out instinctively –
Like a homing pigeon
Circling to get its bearings;
Years and place-names
Recognised by accents,
Partitioned off at night
By memories of hunger and hate.
For over two years
We lived like birds of passage –
Always sensing a change
In the weather:
Unaware of the season
Whose track we would follow.
A barrier at the main gate
Sealed off the highway
From our doorstep –
As it rose and fell like a finger
Pointed in reprimand or shame;
And daily we passed
Underneath or alongside it –
Needing its sanction
To pass in and out of lives
That had only begun
Or were dying.
– Peter Skrzynecki
Question #12: Compare how each of the two posters explores the power of words and story-telling (4 marks)
Question #13: Explain how the author uses language to describe the passage of life. (4 marks)
Question #13: Explain how the author uses language to describe the passage of life. (4 marks)The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given the instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor, falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating the last sweet bite.
– Joy Harjo
Question #14: Analyse how the illustration represents an idea about childhood engagement with fiction and narrative. (3 marks)
Question #15: How does the poet represent the experience of life in a country town? (4 marks)
You glide on through town,
Your mudguards damp with cloud
The houses there wear their verandahs out of shyness,
All day in the calendared kitchens, women listen
For cars on the road,
Lost children in the bush,
A cry from the mill, a footstep –
Nothing happens.
Sometimes a woman, sweeping her front step,
or a plain young wife at a tank stand fetching water
in a metal bucket will turn round and gaze
at the mountains in wonderment,
looking for a city.
As night comes down, the houses watch each other,
a light going out in a window has a meaning.
Men sit after tea
by the stove where their wives talk, rolling a dead match
between their fingers,
thinking of the future.
– Les Murray
Question #16. How has Gao used language to challenge racist assumptions? (5 marks)
For the Man on the Bus who Told me to Go Back to Where I Came From
There are darker continents than you could dream
Where children with skin only a shade
Lighter than the brown earth
Cup their hands around their mouths and wake
The mountains with their brazen lungs, while
the tea field gleams and echoes
with the name of every leaf and sparrow. For each birdsong
a barnhouse, a boathouse. Bales of hay
beside which our mother has placed,
with care, ears of maize
rows of gold
teeth swaddled in soft green, and a stand
of willows to which our grandfather had tied
the long years of his servitude, laying
down his storied life like an ox
relieved of the weight of the iron plough.
Where I come from, we dig and sow
until the dirt eats away the lines
in our palms. We write our lineage with spades
solemnly in the book of the good turf.
You do not know where I come from.
Where I come from, we bathe
in the river’s blazing dusk, wash the day
off our wrists and faces
then each emerges
unburnt as a young phoenix.
Do not claim
to know where we come from.
Our language is the rain
pattering against rooftops
when the field’s fire won’t stop.
We whisper tender shoots
into the spring soil
and bury our roots so deep
no axe can cut them loose.
– Gavin Yan Gao
Question #17: How does the composer use language to convey both the potentials and the limitations of the human experience? (4 marks)
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
– Sylvia Plath
Question #18: Analyse how the father shares his personal experience and advice about love. (4 marks)
Author John Steinbeck received a letter from his 14-year-old son, Thom from boarding school who told of Susan, a young girl he had fallen in love with. This is his father’s reply.
November 10, 1958
Dear Thom:
We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view.
First – if you are in love- that’s a good thing – that’s about the best thing that can happen to
anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.
Second – There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing
which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an
outpouring of everything good in you – of kindness and consideration and respect – not only
the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.
You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply – of course it isn’t puppy love.
But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you
wanted me to help you with is what to do about it– and that I can tell you.
Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.
The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.
If you love someone – there is no possible harm in saying so – only you must remember that
some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take the shyness into consideration.
Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.
It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another – but that
does not make your feeling less valuable and good.
Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.
And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry.
Nothing good gets away.
Love, Fa
Question #19: Evaluate how Nardi Simpson shows the joy of solitude in nature. (4 marks)
As Margaret sat up and placed her feet upon the dirt floor, a family of sulphur-crested cockatoos dived into the enormous red gum at the front of her camp. She slipped her arms into her nightgown as the birds screeched, her nightgown’s hem floating like her own tail behind her as she walked out of her room, pulled aside the heavy canvas that hung as her front door, and stepped outside. Lifting the lid of the browning water drum and placing it silently down, she cupped her hands then submerged them, allowing the water’s icy pulse to stream into her veins. To take her mind from the stinging cold, she began to hum, careful to restrict the descending line so that only a series of squeaks and gushes of air emitted from her body. While her hands floated, she swam in the song. Margaret lifted her face towards the
sky, its rising warmth pushing her chin upwards, closing her eyes. Heat crept into the lines on her face; she felt it drip into her brow and trickle towards her lips from the pathways at her temples and her cheeks. With her hands in the water and her face to the sun, Margaret
Lightning continued her song. She hummed as she rubbed water into her face and ran her wet hands through her hair, as she then twisted and pulled it into her regular low bun. She even hummed as she prodded at the wiry strands of grey that had begun to spark at her forehead.
– Nardi Simpson
Question #20: How does Tony Parsons reveal the impact of significant experiences on personal identity? (4 marks)
It’s a boy, it’s a boy!
It’s a little boy. I look at this baby — as bald, wrinkled, and scrunched up as an old man —
And something chemical happens inside me.
It — I mean he — looks like the most beautiful baby in the history of the world. Is it — he — really the most beautiful baby in the history of the world? Or is that just my biological programming kicking in? Does everyone feel this way? Even people with plain babies? Is our baby really so beautiful?
I honestly can’t tell.
The baby is sleeping in the arms of the woman I love. I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the pair of them, feeling like I belong in this room with this woman and this baby in a way that I have never belonged anywhere.
Later, my parents are there. When she is done with the hugs and kisses, my mother counts the baby’s fingers and toes, checking for webbed feet. But he is fine, the baby is fine.
“He’s a little smasher,” my mum says. “A little smasher!”
My father looks at the baby and something inside him seems to melt.
There are many good things about my father, but he is not a soft man, he is not a sentimental man. He doesn’t gurgle and coo over babies in the street. My father is a good man, but the things he has gone through in his life mean that he is also a hard man. Today, some ice deep inside him begins to crack and I can tell he feels it too.
This is the most beautiful baby in the world.
I give my father a bottle I bought months ago. It is bourbon. My father only drinks beer and whisky, but he takes the bottle with a big grin on his face. The label on the bottle says “Old Granddad.” That’s him. That’s my father.
And I know today that I have become more like him. Today I am a father too. All the supposed
landmarks of manhood — losing my virginity, getting my driving licence, voting for the first time — were all just the outer suburbs of my youth. I went through all those things and came out the other side fundamentally unchanged, still a boy.
But now I have helped to bring another human being into the world.
Today I became what my father has been forever.
Today I became a man.
I am twenty-five years old.
– Tony Parsons
Looking for feedback on any of your short answer responses? Just ask Artie, our AI English tutor!
The truth is that lots of schools gloss over the short answer section in class to focus on the prescribed texts and essay writing. This means it’s often really unclear how to structure responses and answer the question with this smaller word limit.
That’s why Artie is here to help with the marking feedback tool which will give you instant feedback on your response to help you learn how to construct arguments and analyse unseen texts.
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Sample Downloadable HSC English Paper 1
Sample Paper and Answers
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Christina Ugov is currently completing a double degree in International and Global Studies and Theatre and Performance at the University of Sydney. Outside of her studies, she enjoys exploring creative writing projects, analysing literature and playing with her cat. She spends her spare time reading, listening to music and drinking lots of tea.
