Reading practice tests — NSW Selective 2027

We lived eight floors up, in a flat so small that the balcony counted as another room. When I was very little the drop terrified me — I would not go within arm's reach of the railing, and Mum had to prise my fingers off the doorframe just to peg out the washing.

Somehow, over the years, that narrow ledge became the one place I truly loved. I could sit out there alone for a whole afternoon, watching the traffic crawl and the lights blink on across the city, wanting no company but my own. It taught me, I think, how to be still. We moved to a house with a proper garden the year I turned eleven, and I know I ought to have been pleased. But the block still stands, and once, from the top of a passing bus, I caught sight of a stranger's shirts pegged along my old railing, and something in me tightened.

Every summer of my childhood belonged to my grandparents' farm, a good two hours past the last set of traffic lights. The house was always full — cousins underfoot, the kettle never off the boil. Pop had me up before the sun, and by the time the others stirred we had milked and walked half the fences.

I grumbled plenty, but he never once let me give up on a job partway through, and that has stayed with me longer than anything I picked up in a classroom. I was a jumpy kid, scared stiff of the walk to the shed after dark, until the night Pop simply put the torch in my hand and went back to bed. When he died, the farm was sold to people we had never met, and I have not driven out that way since — I couldn't stand to see another family's dog asleep in the yard. That place made me, and now it belongs to strangers.

I was not, by any measure, a bookish child. I fidgeted, I interrupted, I could not sit still through a single chapter. What changed me was the reading room of our town library — the tall windows, the green-shaded lamps, the particular hush that made even my fidgeting go quiet.

Mrs Aldous, who ran the reference desk, worked out what I liked long before I did, and would slide a book across to me without a word. Our own house was small and loud, and here at last was somewhere I could hear myself think. I read my way along whole shelves. I am the first in my family with any wish to make up stories and set them down myself, and I trace that entirely to those quiet afternoons. Best of all, it is every bit still there — the lamps, the hush, Mrs Aldous herself — and I go back most Saturdays, older now, and no less thankful.

The rockpools at the bottom of our street were my entire world. I ought to admit that I could not always swim — the sea scared the life out of me, all that cold green heave and drag, and for one whole summer I paddled no deeper than my knees.

It was my cousin Tam, three years older and frightened of nothing on earth, who dared me out past the first line of rocks and would not let go of my hand until I stopped thrashing about. After that there was no stopping me. We moved north for Mum's work the year I turned ten, hours from the nearest coast, and I cried the entire drive. But every single holiday since, I have gone straight back to those pools — the same rocks, the same freezing water — and the instant I duck under, I am home again. The sea taught me to be brave, and I do not mean to let it go.