Free Year 9 Literary devices — extended metapho... Practice | Skillo

Question 1 — Easy

Read the following passage, then answer the question. Nadia had inherited her grandmother's garden along with the house — a sprawling, somewhat chaotic half-acre that her grandmother had tended with fierce devotion for forty years. Where others saw overgrowth, her grandmother had seen a living archive: each plant a chapter, each season a revision. The ancient fig tree near the back fence had been planted the year her grandmother arrived in Australia. The rosemary hedge along the eastern boundary marked the year Nadia's mother was born. And the sprawling patch of warrigal greens, a native succulent her grandmother had cultivated long before 'bush tucker' became fashionable, was, she had always insisted, a reminder that this land had its own knowledge long before any of them arrived. Nadia stood at the back door, secateurs in hand, suddenly reluctant to prune anything at all. In this passage, the garden is best understood as a symbol of:

Answer: Option A is correct — The passage explicitly describes each plant as representing a moment in personal and cultural history — the fig tree, the rosemary hedge, and the warrigal greens each carry layered significance. The garden is portrayed as a living record of memory and heritage.

Question 2 — Medium

Read the following passage, then answer the question. Anika had studied the architecture of the Sydney CBD for her Year 12 major project, and what surprised her most was not the grandeur of the modern glass towers but the tenacity of the older buildings beneath them. Sandstone facades from the nineteenth century stood wedged between skyscrapers, their ornate carvings worn smooth by decades of city air and rain. She had expected to find a story of replacement — old swept away by new. Instead she found a palimpsest: layer upon layer of time visible simultaneously, each era having inscribed itself over the last without fully erasing what came before. The city, she decided, was not a record of progress but of accumulation. In this passage, Anika uses the word 'palimpsest' to convey:

Answer: Option D is correct — A palimpsest is a manuscript where earlier writing is incompletely erased and remains visible beneath later text. Anika applies this metaphor to the city's architecture to describe layers of history coexisting simultaneously — old buildings visible among the new. Option C best captures this meaning.