Reading and translation

A2 2 Section B lasts two hours and contains four tasks of very different kinds. Allocate the time and justify each allocation from what the task actually demands.

1. 01Question 1, gap-filling — 20 minutes

   The shortest task and the one most likely to be finished early or abandoned. Each gap has a grammatical shape as well as a meaning: the slot may need a genitive, a verbal noun, a mutated form or a specific tense. Twenty minutes allows a first pass on meaning and a second pass checking that each inserted word carries the right ending and the right mutation.

2. 02Question 2, questions answered in Irish — 30 minutes

   The same technique as the AS comprehension: read the questions first, locate, then build the answer out of the question's own structure. Thirty minutes for a set of questions is comfortable if the reading is done efficiently and cramped if the passage is read twice in full before the questions are looked at.

3. 03Question 3, summary in English — 30 minutes

   Approximately 100 words is a hard limit disguised as a soft one, and it is where the time goes. Ten minutes reading and selecting, ten writing, ten cutting. The cutting is not optional: a first draft of a 100-word summary is almost always 140 words, and the specification also assesses quality of written communication here.

4. 04Question 4, translation into Irish — 35 minutes

   The most demanding task in the section and the one that should never be left last by accident. One hundred and thirty words of English into Irish requires a decision about gender, case, mutation and idiom in almost every clause, and a rushed translation shows it immediately. Thirty-five minutes allows roughly fifteen for a first pass, ten for a careful second and ten for checking mutations alone.

5. 05The remaining 5 minutes — the sweep

   Not a re-read of everything, which is impossible. Two targeted checks: is the summary within the word limit, and does every Irish answer have the mutations its triggers demand? Those are the two places where marks are most often lost for reasons that have nothing to do with understanding.

6. 06The order to do them in

   Not necessarily 1, 2, 3, 4. Many candidates do better taking Question 4 second, while they are fresh and before the summary has drained their concentration, and leaving the gap-fill for a tired mind because it is the most mechanical. Decide your own order in advance and rehearse it; do not improvise it on the day.

Result: Twenty minutes on the gap-fill, thirty on the Irish-medium questions, thirty on the English summary including a compulsory cutting phase, thirty-five on the translation into Irish, and five for two targeted checks — with the order of the four tasks decided and rehearsed beforehand rather than improvised.

Read the following short passage and answer the questions in Irish, distinguishing located from constructed answers. The passage: Tá athrú mór tagtha ar shaol na ndaoine óga le fiche bliain anuas. Nuair a bhí mo mháthair ar scoil, ní raibh fón ag duine ar bith sa rang. Bhíodh siad ag scríobh litreacha chuig a gcairde. Anois, bíonn gach duine ar líne ó mhaidin go hoíche.

1. 01First, understand it in English

   A great change has come over the life of young people in the past twenty years. When my mother was at school, nobody in the class had a phone. They used to write letters to their friends. Now everyone is online from morning until night.

2. 02Note the grammar carrying the meaning

   Ar shaol shows lenition after ar; na ndaoine óga shows eclipsis in the genitive plural after na; a gcairde shows eclipsis after the possessive meaning their; bhíodh is the past habitual and is the whole reason we know letter-writing was a routine and not a single event; ó mhaidin shows lenition after ó and go hoíche the h-prefix after go.

3. 03Located question one

   Cé a bhí ar scoil gan fón? Who was at school without a phone? Answer: Bhí máthair an údair ar scoil gan fón, agus ní raibh fón ag duine ar bith sa rang. The author's mother was at school without a phone, and nobody in the class had one. The answer reuses bhí and ní raibh from the passage inside its own frame.

4. 04Located question two

   Cad é a bhíodh ar siúl acu in áit teachtaireachtaí a chur? What did they used to do instead of sending messages? Answer: Bhíodh siad ag scríobh litreacha chuig a gcairde. They used to write letters to their friends. Here a near-verbatim answer is correct, because the question asked what they did.

5. 05Constructed question one

   Cén tuairim atá ag an údar faoin athrú? What is the author's view of the change? Nothing in the passage states one. Answer honestly and give the evidence: Ní thugann an t-údar a thuairim féin ar an athrú; ní deir sé ach gur athrú mór é. The author does not give his own opinion on the change; he only says that it is a great change.

6. 06Constructed question two

   Cad é a chiallaíonn an focal bhíodh sa tríú habairt? What does the word bhíodh mean in the third sentence? Answer: Ciallaíonn sé gur nós a bhí ann seachas rud a tharla uair amháin. It means it was a habit rather than something that happened once. This is a grammar question inside a reading paper, which is exactly the kind of question the A2 gap-fill is testing in another form.

Result: Four answers: two located, both reusing the passage's own verbs inside the candidate's frames; and two constructed, one of which correctly reports that the author states no opinion rather than inventing one, and one of which explains a tense. Each constructed answer names its evidence, and the whole exercise turns on noticing the past habitual.

Translate the following into accurate English, naming the decision at each step. Tá athrú mór tagtha ar shaol na ndaoine óga le fiche bliain anuas. Nuair a bhí mo mháthair ar scoil, ní raibh fón ag duine ar bith sa rang. Bhíodh siad ag scríobh litreacha chuig a gcairde. Anois, bíonn gach duine ar líne ó mhaidin go hoíche.

1. 01Sentence one — the perfect, and a decision about 'life'

   Tá ... tagtha is the perfect: a change HAS come, not is coming. Ar shaol na ndaoine óga is literally on the life of the young people. English does not say the life of young people comfortably here; young people's lives is idiomatic. Decision: 'A great change has come over young people's lives in the past twenty years.' The literal alternative is defensible but reads as translated.

2. 02Sentence two — tá X ag Y

   Ní raibh fón ag duine ar bith sa rang is literally there was not a phone at anybody in the class. The standard conversion applies: possession expressed with ag becomes English have. Decision: 'nobody in the class had a phone'. Note that duine ar bith is nobody in a negative sentence, not anybody.

3. 03Sentence three — the past habitual

   Bhíodh siad ag scríobh is the past habitual with a progressive: they used to write, or they would write. This is the one place a mark is genuinely available for noticing a tense, because they wrote would be wrong — it would report a single occasion. Decision: 'They used to write letters to their friends.'

4. 04Sentence four — the habitual present and an idiom

   Bíonn gach duine ar líne is the habitual present: everyone is online, as a matter of routine. Ó mhaidin go hoíche is from morning to night, which is idiomatic in both languages and needs no adjustment. Decision: 'Now everyone is online from morning till night.'

5. 05The English pass, with the Irish put away

   'A great change has come over young people's lives in the past twenty years. When my mother was at school, nobody in the class had a phone. They used to write letters to their friends. Now everyone is online from morning till night.' Read alone, it is ordinary English prose with no trace of the source syntax, which is what the accurate-English clause is asking for.

6. 06The accuracy pass, with the Irish back in front of you

   Check four things specifically: every tense, every negative, every number, and every possessive. Here: the perfect in sentence one, the negative in sentence two, twenty in sentence one, and their in sentence three, where a gcairde is unambiguously their friends because of the eclipsis. All four survive.

Result: Four sentences, four decisions — the perfect, the ag-possession conversion, the past habitual, and an idiom left alone — followed by two separate checking passes: one reading only the English for fluency, one comparing tenses, negatives, numbers and possessives against the Irish.

Translate five short English sentences into Irish in the style of AS 2 Section C Question 5, naming the tense, the structure and the mutation in each.

1. 01I have been living in Belfast for three years.

   Tá mé i mo chónaí i mBéal Feirste le trí bliana. Tense: Irish uses the present with le for a state continuing into the present, where English uses a perfect continuous. Structure: i mo chónaí, the possessive plus verbal noun idiom for residing. Mutations: mo lenites cónaí to chónaí; i eclipses B to mB. Number: bliain becomes bliana after a numeral.

2. 02If I had more time, I would read more.

   Dá mbeadh níos mó ama agam, léifinn níos mó. Tense: conditional in both clauses, as in English. Structure: dá plus the conditional of bí; possession by ag. Mutations: dá eclipses beadh to mbeadh. Case: am becomes the genitive ama after níos mó.

3. 03The teacher told us that the examination would be difficult.

   Dúirt an múinteoir linn go mbeadh an scrúdú deacair. Tense: past reporting a conditional, exactly as in English. Structure: the prepositional pronoun linn for 'to us'. Mutations: go eclipses beadh to mbeadh. Note that no lenition applies to múinteoir after an, because it is masculine and in the nominative.

4. 04She has not been at school since Monday.

   Níl sí ar scoil ó Dé Luain. Tense: Irish present where English uses a perfect, because the state is current. Structure: níl is the negative of tá, containing the dependent form fuil; ar scoil is the fixed phrase with no article. The preposition ó carries 'since' with a point in time.

5. 05Young people should be given more freedom.

   Ba cheart níos mó saoirse a thabhairt do dhaoine óga. Structure: the English passive is reformulated as an active construction — it ought to be right to give. Mutations: the object particle a lenites tabhairt to thabhairt; do lenites daoine to dhaoine. Agreement: óga is the plural adjective after a plural noun.

6. 06The pattern across all five

   Not one of the five could be produced by replacing English words with Irish ones. Three needed a different tense from the English, two needed a prepositional pronoun, one needed a genitive, one needed the passive reformulated, and every single one carried at least one mutation. That is the actual content of the task.

Result: Five sentences carrying between them the present-for-perfect rule with le and ó, the conditional after dá, reported speech after go, the negative dependent form in níl, the ag-possession idiom, the i mo chónaí construction, a genitive after níos mó, and six separate mutations — none of which is visible from the English.

A candidate has summarised an Irish article about a community language scheme in 145 words. Cut it to approximately 100 without losing an idea, and name the rule applied at each cut.

1. 01Cut one — adjectives, about 12 words

   'A very successful and much-admired local scheme' becomes 'a local scheme'. Evaluative adjectives almost always came from the candidate rather than from the passage, and where they did come from the passage they were the writer's opinion, which should be attributed rather than absorbed.

2. 02Cut two — examples, about 15 words

   The passage listed four activities; the summary listed all four. Keep the category and one instance: 'classes, among them conversation circles'. A summary that reproduces a list has spent its words demonstrating that it can read rather than that it can select.

3. 03Cut three — repetition, about 10 words

   The draft said the scheme was growing in the second sentence and that numbers were rising in the fifth. One of those goes. Repetition in a summary usually comes from summarising paragraph by paragraph instead of summarising the argument.

4. 04Cut four — nuance clauses, about 8 words

   'Which, although not without its critics, has continued' becomes 'which has continued', and the criticism is either dropped or promoted to its own short clause if it is load-bearing. Decide which; do not leave it half-present.

5. 05What must NOT be cut

   The attributions — 'the organiser says', 'according to the report' — and the load-bearing figures. If the passage's point is that the scheme has trebled in three years, the words 'trebled' and 'three years' are the summary. Cutting them to save four words destroys the thing you were summarising.

6. 06The final read

   Count: 100 words, give or take. Then read it aloud. If it now reads as a telegram — no articles, no finite verbs, no connectives — put four words back, because quality of written communication is assessed and 'approximately 100' means approximately.

Result: Forty-five words removed in four passes — evaluative adjectives, a reproduced list, one repeated point and one nuance clause — with attributions and load-bearing figures explicitly protected, followed by a read-aloud check that the result is still English prose rather than notes.