Primary 5 · English · Continuous Writing
Continuous Writing questions for Primary 5 English
10 questions to work through online, 3 of them written out the way the paper asks. Answer and you get the working straight away, then a score at the end. No sign-up, and you can retake it as often as you like.
- Reading the title
- Cutting explanation
- Choosing where to begin
- Dialogue that earns its place
- Keeping to one point of view
- An ending that answers the opening
- Varying sentence length
- Writing a stronger verb
- Writing a time connector
- Cutting a repeated word
Answers and explanations for all 10 questions
Every answer with the reasoning behind it. Worth reading after you have tried the set — or on its own, if you are a parent marking it.
The title is "A Difficult Decision". Which story answers it best?
Answer: A boy who must choose between covering for his friend and telling the truth.
The title has two words and both must be earned: a real choice between two things, and a cost either way. Loyalty against honesty gives you both.
Which sentence should be cut?
Answer: Sentence 3
Sentence 3 explains what a relay is to a reader who already knows. Explaining something the reader does not need is the commonest way to waste an opening paragraph.
You are writing about a lost dog that was found after three days. Where should the story start?
Answer: At the moment the dog is discovered missing.
A story starts where the trouble starts. Everything before that is background, and background can be worked in once the reader is already holding on.
Which line of dialogue is worth keeping in a composition?
Answer: "You told me you had already sent it," my mother said, and put down the phone.
It carries information, shows the mother's feeling without naming it, and ends with an action. Dialogue earns its place by doing more than one job.
The story is told by a girl in the first person. Which sentence breaks that?
Answer: Behind her, the shopkeeper was wondering whether to call her mother.
A narrator can see the shopkeeper and guess at his thoughts, but cannot report what he was wondering. That needs a narrator inside his head.
The story opens: "I have always been the slowest runner in my class." Which ending answers that opening?
Answer: I came fourth out of four, and my teammates were waiting at the line anyway.
The opening sets up slowness. The ending keeps it and changes what it costs — she is still last, and it no longer matters. That is what answering an opening means.
Which passage reads best?
Answer: The lights went out. I heard my brother's chair scrape, then nothing at all, and I stood there counting to ten in the dark before anyone spoke.
A short sentence for the event, then a longer one for the waiting. Varying the length is what lets the pace do some of the work.
Replace the marked words with one stronger verb. The wind [made a loud noise] in the casuarina trees all night.
Answer: howled
Howled carries both the wind and the noise in one word, so the sentence no longer needs four words to say it.
Write one word for the blank. We searched the whole void deck twice. ______ , my sister was already at home, asleep on the sofa.
Answer: Meanwhile
Meanwhile takes the reader to what was happening somewhere else at the same time, which is exactly the gap between the search and the sofa.
One word in the marked part is not needed. Write the word to delete. She [reversed back] into the parking space without looking.
Answer: back
To reverse is to go backwards, so back says it twice. Cutting the repeated word is the quickest way to tighten a sentence.