IBDP英文A题目示例
Write a guided literary analysis on one passage only. In your answer you must address both of the guiding questions provided.
7:07 a.m. (by my digital bedside clock)
I must tell you something. When I woke up just a few moments ago I had the most alarming sensation. It was a feeling of instant alertness. Usually my mind lags vaguely behind my brain when it wakes, like the cranking up of an old lethargic engine, taking several seconds to gain full speed. But this morning I know something’s up because when my eyes opened my mind opened too, eager as a young person’s, with the immediacy of a lightbulb once you’ve flicked the switch. It’s as if my body has sensed something before my brain has had a chance to work it out.
Then, with a bolt of understanding, it strikes me.
My little sister, Vivien, is dead.
Dead right here in this house, fifteen yards away in her room in the east wing, along the landing and left through the glass-paned double doors. I feel a sick surge of dread rising from the core of my stomach, spreading menace throughout my frail body. Pricking it coldly. Smothering all my usual morning aches.
Let me think now. I heard her during the night at five to one, when she got up to make her usual cup of tea, but I didn’t hear her again, as I have every other night she’s been here, going to the lavatory at five, and I haven’t yet heard her this morning going down to get her tea even though it’s now well past seven. Every other morning she’s been like clockwork, straight down to the kitchen at seven on the dot*.
I’m still in bed with the blankets pulled up to my chin and my hands locked by my sides. I haven’t moved a muscle since I woke. I don’t dare, for fear that somehow it might upset the delicate balance of life and death that has threatened the house this morning. If I strain my eyes to the right, I can just about see my bedside clock. It makes me feel safer, knowing that it’s there, looking after the time for me.
I think I should tell you there’s a much more substantial reason for my knowing that she’s dead than not having heard her this morning. Did I tell you last night, when I found the poisons upstairs in the laboratory, that I took down a tin of potassium cyanide powder from the very top shelf? I secreted it up the left sleeve of my dressing-gown (pinching the cuff round the bottom so it wouldn’t fall out) and took it downstairs to the kitchen. I put half a teaspoonful in her milk in the fridge, then hid the tin behind the bottles in the drinks cabinet in the library. And you know how she likes to take her tea milky.
But, of course, the problem is I can’t be absolutely one hundred per cent sure she’s dead unless I go and check her. What if she’s not dead? What if she’s just half dead? (You can never be sure of getting the correct concentration per pound of body mass.) I can’t have her being found half dead: she’ll be prodded and probed until they find out she’s been poisoned. I can’t think why it didn’t occur to me before that I’ll have to actually go and check her. I can’t possibly do that. It’s not within my boundary. I’ve not been in that part of the house for forty-seven years. I wouldn’t feel safe.
