The Wykehamist
General Paper II
Getting into Winchester is no joke. We are known throughout the country for having our own, eponymous“ Winchester Entrance” exams. We don’ t do Common Entrance, or the Common Academic Scholarship( it makes me wonder, out of curiosity, whether we’ re even affiliated with the ISEB). The criterion is simple; if you want to enter Winchester College in JP, you need to succeed in one of our two exams. The first one of these is the aforementioned Winchester Entrance. I have no memory of this, save for practice papers done at my prep school. This is because instead, I took Winchester Election, hoping to become a scholar and get into College. The rest, as they say, is history. Election consists of multiple exams. You have the compulsory papers in English, maths, science, and of course, the secretive General I( verbal reasoning) paper. You then have to choose a few more subjects to fill in your set. And make no mistake – Election papers are crazy. There was a French paper once that stumped an actual French colleague of my dad’ s. The history paper throws a whole six sources at whichever poor Year 8 student decided to sit history. One year, the students sitting geography were handed a bag of gravel at their desks. But the weirdest of them all, in my opinion, is General II.
General II is not a reasoning paper. It is not a quiz. There are no right or wrong answers. You just have to make a convincing, intellectual argument, and put it on paper. The best way I can put it is that General II is Div, but before Div. Picture this – Election has come and gone for the future 2025-30 cohort. I’ m sitting in College, and I happen to look upon this year’ s General II paper. I flick through it, and an idea comes to my mind: what if I try my hand at one of the questions for The Wykehamist? I never got a chance to try this in the real thing – I sat Winchester Election in The Year That Ruined Everything, 2020. Only the core exams were sat in person, and two days after those very exams, the government enforced its Covid lockdown. I only did one non-core subject that year – Latin. Even then, that was in the form of an online interview with RJHM. I remember it fondly because he commented on the strong Roman / Italian accent I use whenever I speak Latin, because, linguistically speaking, it was
spoken in Italy by the ancestors of the Italians – in fact, it’ s the literal ancestor of the Italian language. But anyway, back to the point at hand: what am I capable of in an answer to a General II question, five years on? The question goes thus.
“ This image is from the frontispiece of The Man in the Moone( 1638), one of the first works of English science fiction. The text, which was published under the pseudonym Domingo Gonsales, is a utopian travel narrative that describes the fictitious narrator’ s geese-powered journey to the moon. It was in fact written by Francis Godwin( 1562-1633), a famous historian and antiquary who served as bishop of Llandaff and Hereford. Godwin’ s text combined sophisticated ideas from astronomy and cosmology with entertaining details relating to space travel, language and extraterrestrial life. Why on earth do people want to read about space travel? [ 15 marks ]”
You got all that? OK. My attempt is as follows.
Space travel represents something thought for centuries to only exist in fiction. It is, by
design, tedious and difficult to achieve.
That said, it is exactly these qualities which give space travel its lure and its sense of awe and wonder. The idea of“ space” as we recognise it( an environment around
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