Three shorter passages with 17 mixed questions — fiction, non-fiction and poetry — mirroring the adaptive pre-test format.

ISEB Pre-Test Style — Adaptive Practice Set

Mei had been waiting for the Mooncake Festival all year. Every September, her grandmother flew over from Hong Kong with a suitcase that always smelled, faintly and impossibly, of jasmine tea and sticky-rice flour. Inside the suitcase were the mooncakes — round, golden, embossed with delicate Chinese characters — and Mei was allowed exactly one, sliced into four small pieces, after dinner.

"Why only one?" she had asked, when she was seven.

"Because the moon is round," her grandmother had said. "And because the best things should never be hurried."

Mei was eleven now, and she had stopped asking. She understood, in the careful way that children of her age sometimes do, that the rule was not really about mooncakes.

This year, the festival fell on a Wednesday, which meant that Mei would have to do her geography homework first. She sat at the kitchen table, watching her grandmother slice a mooncake into four perfect pieces with a thin silver knife. Outside, the late September sky was already darkening; a single, pearl-white moon hung above the chimneys.

"Po Po," Mei said, "what did you do for the festival when you were my age?"

Her grandmother did not look up. "I helped my own grandmother bake them," she said. "In a kitchen that was smaller than this table. We had no oven, only a steamer. The whole house smelled of sugar and lotus seeds for three days."

Mei looked down at the small wedge of mooncake in front of her. Suddenly, eating it slowly felt like the easiest thing in the world.

The Mooncake Festival

Honeybees do not have voices. They do not write letters, and they certainly do not send text messages. And yet, every day, inside the warm hum of a beehive, hundreds of bees manage to share precise information with each other — directions to the best flowers, news about a new water source, and warnings about danger. They do all of this with one of the most remarkable forms of communication in the animal kingdom: the waggle dance.

When a worker bee finds a particularly good patch of flowers, she returns to the hive and performs a dance on the vertical surface of the honeycomb. The dance has two parts. First, the bee walks in a straight line, waggling her body from side to side. Then she circles back to her starting point, alternating between a left circle and a right circle, so that her path traces a flat figure of eight. The other bees gather around her, antennae lifted, watching closely.

Astonishingly, every part of the dance carries information. The direction the bee walks — measured against the position of the sun — tells the other bees the direction they must fly. The length of time she waggles tells them how far away the flowers are: a longer waggle means a longer journey. And the vigour of her dance — how energetic and enthusiastic it is — tells the others how rich the flowers are.

The discovery of the waggle dance, by the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch in the 1940s, was so surprising that many other scientists refused to believe it. It earned him a Nobel Prize in 1973. Today, the waggle dance is studied in classrooms all over the world, a reminder that even the smallest creatures may be doing something far more clever than we ever expected.

How Bees Talk to Each Other

The old oak whispers in the breeze,
He stretches out his weary arms;
His leafy fingers brush the leaves
And hum the songs of summer farms.

He has seen a thousand winters pass,
A thousand summers come and go.
The children climbed him, swung and sang,
And carved their names in long ago.

Now no one comes to play, but still
He keeps his patient, leafy guard;
He holds the sky upon his crown
And waits beside the empty yard.

ISEB Pre-Test Style — Adaptive Practice Set

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