Sutton SET English Mock Paper 3

A

Appreciate keeps a double p and a single t: ap-pre-ci-ate, with just one a before the ending.

B drops one of the p letters, C doubles the t, D swaps the e for an i, and E adds an extra a after the r.

D

Vegetables keeps the whole of vegetable and adds s: veg-e-ta-bles. Saying it slowly in four beats gets you every letter.

Vegtables drops the first e, vegatables and vegetibles swap a vowel, and vegetabels turns the last two letters round.

B

Available is avail with able added on: avail-able, and able always keeps its a.

A changes able to the wrong ending, C swaps the letters in avail round, D drops the a from able, and E drops the i from avail.

E

Disastrous drops the e from disaster before adding -rous: disastr-ous, not disaster-ous.

A keeps that e by mistake, B doubles the s at the start, C loses the o before -us, and D adds an extra o instead.

C

Possession has two pairs of s: pos-sess-ion. Four s letters in all, in two tidy pairs.

Posession and possesion each keep only one pair. Posesion has no pair at all, and possetion swaps the second s for a t.

B

Achieve follows i before e except after c, and the c here is in the first syllable, not in front of the ie: a-chieve.

Acheive is the classic reversal. Achive and acheve drop a letter from the ie pair, and acchieve doubles the c.

C

Successful has double c, double s and then a single l: suc-cess-ful. The -ful ending never has two l letters.

Succesful and sucessful each drop one of the doubles, successfull doubles the l, and sucsessful spells the middle by sound.

C

Tomorrow has one m and two r letters: to-mor-row. One mother, two rows.

Tommorow and tommorrow double the m, tomorow loses an r, and tomarrow swaps the middle o for an a.

A

Accompany doubles the c and keeps a single m: ac-com-pany.

B loses one of the c letters, C and E change the vowel before the ending, and D swaps the final y for ie.

C

Restaurant hides the word aunt at the end: rest-au-rant. Getting the au in the middle is the whole battle.

Restarant and resturant lose a letter from that middle, while restaraunt and restuarant put the au in the wrong place.

C

The first sentence says it plainly: she met him twice, at a cousin's wedding and at her grandad's funeral.

The birthday cards came every year, but a card is not a meeting. That is the detail the wrong answers lean on.

B

The narrator unwinds a loop of blue twine to get in, so the gate was shut but not locked.

Nothing at all is close but wrong: the gate was fastened, just not against anybody who wanted to open it.

C

Sylvia gives the figure herself when she introduces herself, and repeats it later about the shears.

Eleven years belongs to Ted's exercise book, not to Sylvia, and it is the number most likely to be picked by mistake.

B

The tin holds seed packets, sorted by month, with a perished elastic band round them.

The pencils are in a jam jar, not the tin, and the shed door is never locked, so no spare key is mentioned anywhere.

C

The entry reads: Asparagus - do not cut this year. Next year. It is an instruction, and it is the last thing he wrote.

The mice belong to a different entry, about the peas. Nothing in the book says the asparagus has failed.

C

The passage says exactly what the outlines are for: a missing fork would show at once. It is a system for checking, not a decoration.

A is true of him, because of the oily rag, but the rag is the evidence for that, not the outlines. B is fair after nine years of one borrowed pair of shears, D is true of the plot as a whole, and E is a reasonable guess about an older man, but none of them explains a painted outline.

B

The two halves of the sentence pull in opposite directions on purpose. A crooked stamp is carelessness; a name spelled right, year after year, is care. He put his effort where it counted.

C is true, and Sylvia proves it later, but it is not what this particular detail shows. A and E are sensible readings of the crooked stamp on its own, and D fits a man who left before the sandwiches, but each of them explains only one half of the sentence.

D

Sylvia is not checking a number. She follows the remark with "He talked about you anyway", and the word anyway does the work: two meetings is what she would expect of Ted, and it made no difference at all.

A takes her literally, which is the easiest trap here. B is the reader's reaction rather than Sylvia's, since nothing about it surprises her. C is a kind reading but she offers no comfort, and E is true without explaining the phrase.

D

Both mugs matter. The worn rim shows one man drinking there for years; the unworn one shows that he kept a second mug anyway, and that hardly anybody ever drank from it.

A is true, but it accounts for only one of the two mugs, which is why it is the tempting answer. B is the opposite of what an unworn rim shows, C is a guess the passage does not support, and E ignores the fact that he laid out a mug for somebody else at all.

A

A window looks out over the plot; a door is where a person arrives. Turning the chair away from the view and towards the entrance is about people, and it fits a man who kept a spare mug on the shelf.

B is exactly what the narrator does at the end, so it is a real thing to do, but it is her habit rather than his. C would be a reason to face the window, D would be a reason to face the back wall where the tools hang, and E is contradicted by the fact that somebody has clearly chosen which way it points.

E

Look at what is on the list: asparagus that gives nothing for three years, rhubarb crowns, a young apple tree, raspberry canes, daffodils. Every one of them is a crop that pays somebody back much later.

C is the strongest wrong answer, and many readers settle for it, but the passage never once says that Ted knew he was ill. A turns a fact about the plants into a fact about the man, B is true of some of the list but not the point, and D is contradicted by the beans and peas in his book.

E

Being caught would turn a gift into a debt. Leaving the bunch and walking away lets the flowers arrive without anything being owed, which is the same instinct as returning borrowed shears sharpened.

D is very close, and it is true that he must have known, but it explains the choosing rather than the hiding. A fits the man at the funeral, B makes a game of it, and C explains why he had flowers to spare, not why he vanished.

D

The word mostly admits that gardening was not the reason. Being left something is about being thought of, and the narrator says outright that this had never happened to her before.

B is true and grows through the passage, but the curiosity comes after the decision. A is not supported at the gate, C makes the decision a duty when she says she wanted it, and E turns her into a treasure hunter.

A

His last line was an order to somebody: do not cut this year. Her line answers it. She uses his pencil, his book and his way of setting things down, and the record simply continues.

B is true as far as it goes, but she does not write about her day, she writes about the asparagus. C confuses copying a habit with copying handwriting, D is a bigger claim than one line can carry, and E invents an audience for a book kept in a shed.

B and C

Perished is what old rubber does: it rots and goes crumbly until it breaks into rings at a touch. Rotted and crumbled both carry that sense of decay.

Died is the everyday meaning of perish and is exactly the trap here, but a rubber band was never alive. Snapped describes one moment rather than the slow change, and stretched is the opposite of brittle.

B and C

She is ruling out the idea that the twine was a job left half done. Neglect and thoughtlessness both name that: not bothering, and not thinking.

Haste is close, because rushing can make people careless, but the word is about attention rather than speed. Cruelty and poverty are about unkindness and money, neither of which is in question at the gate.

A and C

Methodical fits the painted outlines, the seed packets sorted by month and eleven years of dated entries. Generous fits the sweet peas, the sharpened shears and the birthday cards.

Impatient is the opposite of a man who plants asparagus. Boastful is undone by the fact that nobody ever caught him leaving the flowers, and nothing in the passage says anything at all about money.

A and C

The three short sentences state facts and let them do the praising, so she is both admiring and matter-of-fact. She never says he was a good man; she says what he did.

Sentimental is the near-miss, because she clearly liked him, but sentimental language would be soft and this is clipped. Nothing here mocks him, and bitter would need a complaint, which is precisely what she does not make.

E

The passage mentions the window only to say which way the chair does not face, so it is still a window. Nothing is boarded over.

The other four are all stated directly in the paragraph describing the inside of the shed, which is why this question is really a test of careful re-reading.

E

Sylvia says he talked about the narrator, which is not the same as telling her what he had decided. The narrator learns about the plot from a letter, and Sylvia says nothing about having known in advance.

The other four are all stated: the book, the cards, the funeral and the shears. The trap is that E feels like a natural next step from "He talked about you".

A

Nobody in the passage ever mentions Ted's health. The reader may suspect it, because of what he planted and how tidily he left everything, but Sylvia never says it.

The other four all come out of her mouth or out of what the narrator reports her saying. Choosing anything but A means importing a fact the passage has been careful not to give.

E

Potatoes are never mentioned. The list on the back of the seed packet is asparagus, rhubarb, an apple tree, raspberry canes and daffodils, and the sweet peas stand by the gate.

The old entries in the book mention beans and peas, so it is easy to assume a full vegetable plot, but the question asks what is actually there now.

A and B and C

A, B and C all point past the day he stopped. A shed anybody could pick up and use, an instruction about a season he would not see, and seeds put in order for months that had not happened yet.

D and E are both true of him, but they are habits that served him while he was there. Dating an entry helps the person writing it, and where a chair points says nothing about the future.

A and B and C and E

A, B, C and E are all stated in the paragraph about the shelf above the chair.

D is the odd one out and it is the only thing in the list the passage contradicts: he wrote always in pencil, and so does the narrator at the end.

A and B and D and E

A, B and E come from Sylvia, who she has never met before, and D comes from opening the shed. All four are new that day.

C is the one she already knew. The letter from the allotment association arrived before she ever unwound the twine, and it is the reason she is standing there at all.

A and B and C

A and B give the years directly. C gives them indirectly, which is the harder mark: a rim only wears like that after thousands of cups of tea in the same chair.

D points the other way, because a tree that thin was planted recently. E measures the months since anybody worked the plot, not the years before that.

A and B and C and E

A, B and C come from the paragraph where she appears, and E from her opening line: she says "You'll be Ted's girl" before the narrator has said a word.

D reverses what the passage says. Ted was there long before Sylvia, so she met him on the site and not before it.

A and B and D and E

A and B are what the narrator can see from where she stands; D and E are what Sylvia tells her about them.

C is the only invention. Nothing on this plot is grown for money, which is rather the point of the whole passage.

E

The first sentence predicts the mistake; the second, in three words and no explanation, overrules it. That order is the whole trick, and it sets the tone for everything after it.

C becomes true later, in the paragraph about April. A is nearly right but overstates it, since broad beans and parsnips are sown in the weeks that follow. B has the register wrong, because the second sentence is an order, and D would need the writer to allow a reply, which this voice never does.

A

The phrase measures one job against another. Turning the ground in the cold is only half of it; the frost then does the breaking down that would otherwise cost the gardener hours of effort.

C is a genuine effect of frost, and B is sound advice, but neither is a job the gardener's back would otherwise have done to the soil. D is true of winter generally, and E swaps the reason without explaining the phrase.

D

The clause after the word explains it: half of it will never come up at all. Calling the seed idle is a way of saying it does not do its job, which is exactly why the writer has just said to sow thickly.

A is true of parsnips in real life and is the reading most gardeners would reach for, but slow is not the same as never. B moves to the plant instead of the seed, C mistakes a dry joke for a verdict, and E repeats the sentence's other instruction.

B

Rent is what you hand over for the use of something, whether you like it or not. The writer is saying that a share of every crop goes to the wildlife, and that arguing with it is pointless.

C is stated in the sentence before, so it is true, but it is the comfort rather than the comparison. A takes rent literally, D reads a fixed sum into it that the text does not promise, and E is advice the writer never gives.

D

The whole text has been giving general rules. The last line quietly admits their limit: your plot, your soil and your weather are not anybody else's, and only your own record knows them.

B is true and is half of the reason, which makes it the strongest wrong answer, but remembering is not the same as learning more than the catalogue can teach. A and E are fair points about catalogues, and C fixes a timescale on something the sentence uses only as a measure.

E

Netting never appears. The text tells the reader to expect losses to pigeons and slugs and then calls those losses the rent, which is the opposite of telling them to prevent it.

The other four are all given as direct orders, one to a paragraph, and can be found by scanning for the command verbs.

B

Fruit and birds are not in the text at all. The three pests are named in one sentence, and the asparagus warning about one thin meal sits in the paragraph above it.

Birds and fruit go together so naturally in a garden that this option can feel as though it must have been there. It has not; check the words.

E

The text says when to water and where to aim, but never says to water everything every day. It says the opposite of that: a light daily sprinkling is worse than nothing.

The other four are all in the paragraph, and D is the reason the text gives for C, which is why they belong together.

A and B and C and D

A, B, C and D are the four instructions in that paragraph, and each one is stated in a single clause.

E borrows February from the opening paragraph, where it belongs to turning the ground, not to asparagus. The text never gives a month for planting crowns.

A and B and C and E

A, B, C and E can each be matched to a sentence: You will want to begin in March; You will be tempted; You will not remember; Write the label in pencil.

D is the one thing this voice never does. It is certain from beginning to end, and a question would invite the reader to have an opinion.

A and B and D

A, B and D describe the register exactly: no past events, a run of orders such as Turn, Sow, Label and Keep, and a reader spoken to throughout as you.

C and E are both true of Text 1 instead. Text 2 has no characters, no scene and nobody speaking aloud.

B and D

Hardy is a gardener's word for a plant that comes through cold weather undamaged, so tough and able to stand the cold are both right. That is why broad beans can go in before anything tender.

Brave is the everyday meaning of hardy when it is used about people, and it is the trap. Quick to grow and cheap to buy may both be true of broad beans, but neither is what the word means.

A and B

A appears in Text 1 as gives nothing at all for three years and in Text 2 as cut nothing for three years. B appears in Text 2 as planted for your successors, and in Text 1 as a bed with the instruction Next year left beside it.

C and D are both in Text 2 only: Text 1 never explains what early cutting would do, and never mentions a trench. E is in neither, and both texts suggest the opposite.

A and B and C and D

A and D come from the last paragraph of Text 2. B is stated of Ted's book, and C is shown by the entry Rain in the night sitting beside Beans up.

E is exactly wrong twice over. Text 2 says pencil and not ink, and Ted wrote always in pencil.

A and B and C

A, B and C are the three places pencil turns up on plot fourteen. The sharpened jam-jar pencil shows that it was kept ready on purpose, and not just grabbed once.

D and E are both good habits of Ted's, and Text 2 would probably approve of them, but neither has anything to do with what a mark is written in.

A and B and C and D

A and C are in the same short paragraph of Text 2. B and D are in one line of Ted's book: Mice at the peas again, set the trap.

E is not in Text 1. The word again suggests it happened more than once, but nothing says a whole crop went, and the two texts differ here: Text 2 accepts the loss, while Ted set a trap.

B and C and D

B, C and D can all be matched to something the reader of Text 1 actually sees: the pencil, the eleven years of dated entries, and the bed with do not cut this year written beside it.

A and E may well have been true of Ted, but Text 1 never shows either. Parsnips are not on the narrator's list, and nobody in Text 1 waters anything.

A and B and C and E

A, B, C and E all separate the two. Text 2 commands, addresses the reader directly, names nobody at all and has no speech in it.

D is true of Text 1 rather than Text 2, which is the reversal the question is watching for. Text 1 is told throughout in the past tense.

A and B and C and D

A, B, C and D each measure something in years rather than in days: a tree that will fruit long from now, three years before a single cut, five years before a book earns its keep, eleven years of patient entries.

E is a picture of one busy afternoon. It tells us how Sylvia turned up, and nothing about time at all.

A and B and C

A, B and C are all ways of putting information where it can be seen instead of trusting it to memory: the seeds say when, the dates say when, and the outlines say what is missing.

D and E are about getting into the plot rather than remembering anything, and they say something about Ted's trust in his neighbours instead.

B

Text 1 gives the reader a shed, a book and a list and never explains what they mean. Text 2 explains everything and gives the reader no room at all.

A is true and is the least interesting thing about them. C is half true, since both texts mention both. D and E are claims neither text supports.

E

Text 2 supplies the idea and Text 1 supplies the example. Ted put in a bed he could not cut and left a note telling the next person not to cut it either, which is a successor being planted for in both senses.

A is the reading everybody reaches for, and it may well be right, but Text 1 never says he knew. B is true and much too general, C narrows Text 2's advice to old gardeners for no reason, and D is true of the narrator without touching the asparagus.

A

Every you in Text 1 is inside Sylvia's speech marks: You'll be Ted's girl, He talked about you. Every you in Text 2 is aimed straight out of the page at the person holding it.

D is true of Text 2 and is the strongest wrong answer, but it says nothing about Text 1, and the question asks for the difference. B gets Text 2 backwards, C counts the word instead of explaining it, and E offers a reason that is not the real one.

B

Text 2 keeps pointing forward: three years, five years, your successors. Text 1 is a whole plot of slow crops and a note about next year. Both are about work whose reward arrives later, and often to somebody else.

A, C, D and E are each true of some part of one text. Vegetables are grown, Ted had one chair, Sylvia is a neighbour and gardening does take time, but none of those is what the two texts have in common.