The Eleven-Plus Book: Genuine Exam Questions From Yesteryear

By Michael O'Mara Books

Is the nation really dumbing down? Are exams really easier than they were in the good old days? Now's the chance to find out whether age really does equal wisdom with The Eleven-Plus Book, a real way to contrast the schooling of yesteryear with modern-day practices and settle the recent debates. Every generation can attempt questions on a number of subjects from English and arithmetic to general knowledge and composition. Who will come out top in your family? The Eleven-Plus Book is a fantastic nostalgic look back for all those who experienced the daunting exam the first time round, and a great way for the younger generation to prove that they have the wits to outsmart their elders!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael O'Mara
• Release date: Aug 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781843177371

Michael O'Mara Books

Michael O'Mara Books specializes in creative and inspired adult non-fiction. Independent, commercial and always on-trend, O'Mara Books are passionate about their publishing programme and publish an exciting and varied list - from history and popular science to language; sport and biography to puzzles; gift and humour to craft - that reaches readers across the world.

Book preview

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THE

ELEVEN-PLUS

BOOK

GENUINE

EXAM QUESTIONS

FROM

YESTERYEAR

Foreword by

DR MARTIN STEPHEN

High Master of St Paul’s School

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

Michael O’Mara Books Limited

9 Lion Yard

Tremadoc Road

London SW4 7NQ

This electronic edition published in 2011

ISBN: 978-1-84317-737-1 in EPub format

ISBN: 978-1-84317-738-8 in Mobipocket format

ISBN: 978-1-84317-297-0 in hardback print format

Copyright © Michael O’Mara Books Limited 2008

All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Designed and typeset by Martin Bristow

www.mombooks.com

CONTENTS

Foreword by Dr Martin Stephen

Editor’s Note

Questions

Arithmetic

General English

Comprehension

General Intelligence/Knowledge

Essays and Compositions

Answers

Arithmetic

General English

Comprehension

General Intelligence/Knowledge

Acknowledgements

FOREWORD

The Eleven-Plus was born out of the 1944 Butler Education Act, which used the test to decide if a child would go to the academically selective grammar schools, or in the case of failure, to a technical or a secondary modern school. My mother inherited a large stone house in Sheffield, surrounded by one of that city’s bigger council housing estates. Fear of the Eleven-Plus should have stalked the streets of that estate: the ruthless examination that quietly culled the bright working-class children. But the young people I knew had an almost subliminal expectation that their role in life was to go to the secondary modern school (which has since been replaced by the comprehensive school). Was it therefore an exam for the middle class? Well, my highly middle-class brother failed it, and I knew plenty of other middle-class children who didn’t make the grade. So was the Eleven-Plus an exam that failed both the working and the middle classes? It is certainly the most maligned exam in the history of UK education. The mere mention of it is sufficient to provoke violence among left wing and liberal opinion, and it has become the symbol of the longest and most bitter educational war ever fought in this country, namely the war over selection.

It is a war where both sides have a point. Feminists missed a trick when they failed to adopt the Eleven-Plus as one of their symbols of male dominance. Marks had to be fiddled in order to give more grammar school places to boys; the girls did too well at the Eleven-Plus, both for the number of places available and for the attitude of the times to women. Furthermore, the whole structure whereby the Eleven-Plus was marked was based on the supposition that academic ability was in turn based on a ‘normal curve of distribution’, i.e. a few people at the top and a few at the bottom, with most spread on a spectrum of ability in the middle – a bell-shaped curve, in effect. The problem was that no one had ever proved that academic ability was distributed this way.

A further problem was the relatively primitive nature of some of the tests used in the Eleven-Plus. I well remember being ranked as educationally sub-normal (something many people might agree with) on one of these tests. It showed five shapes, and asked which one was the odd one out. The answer was the one that was not based on a triangle. My answer was based on the fact that four of the shapes resembled medieval axe-heads, and one did not. I was rather miffed at being told I was stupid when I thought (and still think) my answer was better than the examiner’s.

Yet one thing shines clear down the ages about the Eleven-Plus for me. When I went up to university in Leeds in 1967, it was full of working-class and maintained-school pupils who had got there through the Eleven-Plus. Whatever evils it may have contained, the Eleven-Plus was the agency whereby huge sectors of English society had the chance of a good university degree opened up to them. It may have caused a lot of casualties, but the Eleven-Plus won a battle in the war of access that our generation appears to be losing.

Dr Martin Stephen

High Master, St Paul’s, 2008

EDITOR’S NOTE

The Eleven-Plus has waned severely in popularity since its inception in the 1940s, and today is used in only a handful of boroughs and counties in England, though more widely in Northern Ireland.

The examination was set by Local Education Authorities in the United Kingdom, and as a result differed in format from region to region. The exam questions we have compiled in this book come from various LEAs, and include entrance exam questions from the 1940s and 1950s. Most Eleven-Plus papers had at least three set constituents – Arithmetic, General Intelligence (sometimes called General Problem Solving or, more commonly now, General Knowledge), and some form of English paper. We have therefore included sections on Arithmetic, General English, Comprehension, General Intelligence, and finally a section on Essays and Compositions. We included this last section so you can see the sort of questions that were asked, and, if you’re feeling creative, you can have a go; but obviously we could not supply set answers for these, so why not mark each other? Don’t be too harsh, though: it’s just for fun!

For the Comprehension and Essay and Compositions questions you would have been given a list of questions from which you would answer two or three in the time allocated. So instead of grouping these in examination papers, we’ve just listed various questions for you to choose from. Similarly, the General Intelligence section is one group of questions rather than a number of papers, simply because of the large number of questions you were expected to answer – to include a few examination papers would have trebled the length of the book!

Because the Eleven-Plus differed in structure in each area of the United Kingdom, the time allocated for exam papers and the marking systems were not consistent across the country. Consequently we have not stipulated a set time in which to answer the questions, though as a guide the Arithmetic and General English papers would normally take 1 to 1½ hours each; and instead of using a marking system we have simply provided the answers so you can compare with your friends and family as to who managed to answer most correctly. There were in fact no grades awarded for the Eleven-Plus: it was simply a case of pass or fail, and of course depended on how many places were actually available in the local grammar, secondary modern and technical schools.

We hope you enjoy getting competitive with your friends and family members as you tackle The Eleven-Plus Book, and discover whether you can meet the standards of the eleven-year-olds of yesteryear!

ARITHMETIC

EXAMINATION 1

1. Simplify:

(a) 15 × 20

(b

(c) 0.75 × 3

2. Write in figures the sum of ninety-five and four hundred and eleven.

3. A train leaves London at 11.30 a.m. and arrives at Bristol at 1.30 p.m., after stopping from 12.10 p.m. to 12.20 p.m. at Reading, which is 36 miles from London. It travelled both parts of the journey at the same rate. Find the distance from London to Bristol.

4. Out of a £6,000 donation, £1,000 was given as prizes to a local school, and half the remainder was given to charity. The rest was divided amongst 4 children. How much did each get?

5. Mary is 12 years old and her father is 42. Answer these questions:

(a) How old was Mary’s father when he was 4 times as old as Mary?

(b) In how many years’ time will her father be 3 times as old as Mary?

(c) How old will Mary be when her father is 10 times as old as Mary was 6 years ago?

6. A machine makes tin boxes at the rate of 78 in 5 minutes. How long will it take to make 3,900 of them? (Answer in hours and minutes.)

7. If 1st December falls on a Friday, on what day will Christmas Day fall that year?

8. A library has 2,672 ‘A’ books and 5,172 ‘B’ books. During the year in ‘A’ section 514 new books are bought, 398 are moved to ‘B’ section, and 23 are lost. In ‘B’ section, 297 are sent to salvage or lost. How