Practice question · SEL-RE-TST-S1-q4
Before the Tide Turns
The sun was only a thin orange line above the sea when Mai and her grandfather, Ông, climbed down onto the rock platform. The tide had drawn back further than she had ever seen it, leaving the flat grey rock wet and shining, scattered with pools like pieces of a broken mirror.
"An octopus," Mai announced. "Today I'm going to find an octopus."
Ông only nodded and lowered himself onto a dry ledge beside the largest pool. He set down his thermos, folded his hands over his knees and gazed into the water as if he were reading a long letter.
Mai did not sit. She hurried from pool to pool, crouching, peering, swishing her fingers through the weed. She lifted a loose flap of kelp. She tapped a sea snail until it pulled itself inside its shell. Every pool looked the same: brown, green and empty.
"There's nothing here," she said at last, flopping down beside him.
"The pool will show you," Ông said, "if you stop asking it to."
Mai rolled her eyes, but she was tired of hurrying, so she stayed. Ông leaned forward and, with both hands, tilted up a flat stone at the edge of the water. Underneath, something pale shrank into a crack. He looked for a moment, then lowered the stone back into its exact hollow, slowly, the way you would close a door on someone sleeping.
They sat. A gull complained somewhere behind them. Mai's legs began to ache, and she thought about the octopus, and then, without meaning to, she stopped thinking about it.
The surface of the pool smoothed. Her own reflection settled and held. And the pool began, very quietly, to fill with life.
A small crab, the colour of wet sand, stepped sideways out from under the ledge. Then another. A tiny fish with a frog-like face hauled itself onto a pebble and stared up at her. Along the far wall, something she had taken for a stain began to move: a sea star, unhurried, its arms curling over the rock.
Mai did not move. She hardly breathed.
When the first wave slid across the platform and nudged at her shoes, she looked up in surprise. Ông was already standing, holding out his hand.
"Tomorrow," he said, "the octopus."
Living Between the Tides
Roughly twice a day, the sea pulls back from the rocky shores of New South Wales and then returns. For the animals that live on a rock platform, this is the central fact of life. For a few hours they are underwater, where food drifts past and the temperature hardly changes. Then the water drains away, and they are left in the open air, under a sun that can heat bare rock until it is too hot to touch.
Each creature has its own way of surviving the dry hours. Sea snails pull back into their shells and seal the opening with a hard little plate, trapping a drop of seawater inside. Waratah anemones, which look like soft red flowers when the tide is in, fold their tentacles away and become shiny blobs of jelly. Crabs, small fish and sea stars squeeze into the places that stay cool and damp: shaded cracks, deep pools and, above all, the undersides of loose rocks.
Hiding also protects them from hunters. When the tide is out, gulls and other shorebirds patrol the platform, and a shadow passing overhead can mean a beak is about to strike. For this reason, many small animals freeze or dart for cover the moment anything moves above them. They creep out again only when everything above the pool has been still for some time.
All of this holds two lessons for human visitors. The first is that a rock is a roof. Turn one over and leave it, and the animals beneath are suddenly exposed to the drying sun and the waiting birds. If you lift a rock to look, put it back gently, the same way up and in the same spot.
The second lesson is that the best way to see a rock pool is not to search it but to wait beside it. Choose a pool, sit where your shadow does not fall across the water, and keep still. Within a few minutes, a pool that seemed empty often turns out to be crowded.
Near the end of Extract A, a pool that seemed empty "began, very quietly, to fill with life". Which idea from Extract B best explains why?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: C
Answer: C
Extract B says small animals hide when something moves above them and "creep out again only when everything above the pool has been still for some time". In Extract A, the animals appear only after Mai stops hurrying, sits beside Ông and does "not move". Her stillness is what lets the hidden animals feel safe to come out.
Why the other options are wrong
- A: When Ông lifts the stone the creature underneath shrinks away, so lifting rocks is not what fills the pool with life.
- B: Extract B says the sun heats the rock, but it never says animals come out in the early morning.
- D: In Extract A the animals appear before the first wave arrives, and Extract B never says the tide brings them back.