Year 9 Test 1 Reading: original practice questions, not affiliated with ACARA

1The workshop smelled the way it always had: machine oil, sawdust and, faintly, the lemons Nan used to keep in a bowl on the windowsill. Priya stood in the doorway with an empty cardboard box under one arm and a roll of rubbish bags in her hand. Mum had given her until the end of the weekend to clear the place out. The real estate agent was coming on Monday.

2She started with the easy things. Rusty clamps went into one bag, bent screwdrivers into another. Every tool carried a small label in Nan’s cramped handwriting (spare, Dad’s, do not lend to Frank) and Priya found herself smiling at each one before she let it go.

3It was the radio that stopped her. It sat on the highest shelf, wedged between two paint tins, its cream plastic gone yellow with age. Priya lifted it down and wiped the dial with her sleeve. She had expected it to be dead, as everything else in the workshop seemed to be, but when she turned the knob, the speaker gave a crackle and then, faintly, a voice reading the footy scores.

4“You kept this running,” she whispered, though there was nobody to hear. Nan had spent forty years repairing other people’s broken things (toasters, lawnmowers, a sewing machine that had once belonged to a neighbour’s mother) and she had never thrown anything away without first trying to coax a little more life out of it.

5Priya sat on an upturned crate with the radio in her lap. Outside, the afternoon light slid down the wall and turned the dust in the air to gold. By now the rubbish bags beside her were nearly empty, and the cardboard box was nearly full.

6When Mum finally appeared in the doorway, she did not say a word about the unfinished job. She looked at the radio, then at Priya, and then she crossed the room and sat down on the crate beside her. “She used to sing along to that,” Mum said quietly. They listened to the end of the scores together, and for a while neither of them reached for a rubbish bag.