ABITURPRÜFUNG 2001 Arbeitszeit: 180 Minuten
ENGLISCH
als Grundkursfach
Textaufgabe II
During the night after his first day Marcus woke up every half-
hour or so. He could tell from the luminous hands of his dinosaur
clock: 10.41, 11.19, 11.55, 12.35, 12.55, 1.31 ... He couldn't
believe he was going to have to go back there the next morning, and
5 the morning after that, and the morning after that, and ... more or
less every morning for the rest of his life, just about.
He just wasn't right for schools. Not secondary schools, anyway.
That was it. And how could you explain that to anyone? It was OK not
to be right for some things (he already knew he wasn't right for
10 parties, because he was too shy, or for baggy trousers, because his
legs were too short), but not being right for school was a big
problem. Everyone went to school. There was no way round it. Some
kids, he knew, got taught by their parents at home, but his mum
couldn't do that because she went out to work. Unless he paid her to
15 teach him - but she'd told him not long ago that she got three
hundred and fifty pounds a week from her job. Three hundred and
fifty pounds a week! Where was he going to get that kind of money
from? Not from a paper round, he knew that much.The only other kind
of person he could think of who didn't go to school was the Macaulay
20 Culkin1 kind. They'd had somthing about him on Saturday-morning TV
once, and they said he got taught in a caravan sort of thing by a
private tutor. That would be OK, he supposed. Better than OK, be-
cause Macaulay Culkin probably got three hundred and fifty pounds a
week, maybe even more, which meant that if he were Macaulay Culkin
25 he could pay his mum to teach him. But if being Macaulay Culkin
meant being good at drama, then forget it: he was crap at drama,
because he hated standing up in front of people. Which was why he
hated school. Which was why he wanted to be Macaulay Culkin. Which
was why he was never going to be Macaulay Culkin in a thousand
30 years, let alone in the next few days. He was going to have to go to
school tomorrow.
He was quiet at breakfast. 'You'll get used to it,' his mum said
as he was eating his cereal, probably because he was looking miser-
able. He just nodded, and smiled at her; it was an OK thing to say.
PLEASE TURN OVER
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35 There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would
get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some
hard things became softer after a very little while. The day after
his dad left, his mum had taken him to Glastonbury with her friend
Corinne and they'd had a brilliant time in a tent. But this was only
40 going get worse. That first terrible, horrible, frightening day
was going to be as good as it got.
He got to school early, went to the form room, sat down at his
desk. He was safe enough there. The kids who had given him a hard
time yesterday were probably not the sort to arrive at school first
45 thing; they'd be off somewhere smoking and taking drugs and raping
people, he thought darkly. There were a couple of girls in the room,
but they ignored him, unless the smort of laughter he heard while he
was getting his reading book out had anything to do with him.
What was there to laugh at? Not much, really, unless you were the
50 kind of person who was on permanent lookout for something to laugh
at. Unfortunately, that was exactly the kind of person most kids
were, in his experience. They patrolled up and down school corridors
like sharks, except that what they were on the lookout for wasn't
flesh but the wrong trousers, or the wrong haircut, or the wrong
55 shoes, any or all of which sent them wild with excitement. As he was
usually wearing the wrong shoes or the wrong trousers, and his
haircur was wrong all the time, every day of the week, he didn't
have to do very much to send them all demented.
From: Nick Hornby, About a Boy, 1998
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Annotation:
1 Macaulay Culkin: famous American child actor
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ENGLISCH als GRUNDKURSFACH - Textaufgabe I
WORKSHEET:
maximum number of
points attainable
I. Questions on the text
Read all the questions first, then answer them
in the given order.
Use your own words as far as is appropriate.
1. Describe the situation Marcus finds himself in during
the night. 10
2. What role does Macaulay Culkin play in Marcus' thoughts? 20
3. What does the reader learn about the boy's family background
and about his relationship to his mother? 10
4. How does Marcus see his fellow pupils? What Thoughts and
feelings do they evoke in him? 10
5. How is Marcus characterized in the text, explicitly and
implicitly? 20
6. What narrative perspective is used in this passage and what
is the effect on the reader? 10
II. Composition 40
Choose o n e of the following topics.
Write about 120 to 150 words.
1. "Schools should concentrate more on developing social
skills than on teaching pupils facts and facts only."
Discuss.
2. Leaving school as soon as possible may be tempting for
quite a few pupils. Weigh the pros and cons.
III. Translation 40
Translate the following text into German:
_____
160
PLEASE TURN OVER
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Whatever happened to school uniform? In the 1960s and 70s it
seemed to be on its way out. But then something happened. Britain
pulled back from total abolition. Today that group of scruffy
adolescents at the school gates will - more likely than not - be
wearing variants on the same basic blue, black or green dress
code1.
Much of the rest of the world would probably see Britain's
school uniforms as an anachronism - so why have many schools voted
to retain them? "They appeal to parents," says Malory Wober of the
University of Michigan. "Uniform represents order and the majority
of British parents still want that from schools." Among headteach-
ers the argument is often put that uniform reduces competitiveness
between fashion-conscious pupils and obscures the differences
between rich and poor children.
British teenagers like the challenge of a uniform. One head
said: "When I think of the efforts they go to to subvert the rules
I think it's almost an essential part of growing up."
From: The Times Educational Supplement, 14 January 2000
1 dress code: set of rules about what clothes you must wear in a
school, business etc.
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