English Assessment Task 2

Part A: By Nathan Brandrick.
Text One - Visual:
a) Text One represents the concept of discovery through the way that they have pictured the faceless individual in the visual text. The picture shows a faceless man wearing a business attire in front of an eagle soaring through a vast, cloud filled sky. The fact that the man is pictured without a face represents the fact that the individual is unsure about who he is and that he has not discovered his true place in life. The artist has also dressed the man in a dress shirt and tie which gives the impression that the man is working an ordinary business job which further emphasises the fact that the individual isn’t achieving any aspirations in life and hasn’t yet fulfilled a journey of self-discovery.

Text Two – Prose Extract Non Fiction:
b) Text Two tells the story of Marie Curie, a Polish born bright minded girl, trying to find her place in the (at the time) men dominated world of science; chemistry to be exact. Being one of only a small fraction of females studying chemistry was only one of the challenges Curie had to face; as well as moving from her home country in Poland to a much more populated Paris France. It was her ‘feistiness and feeling of resisting the status quo’ that her parents instilled into her that ‘served her extremely well when she arrived in Paris’, and to overcome the many challenges she faced. It wasn’t until 1895, when she married renowned physicist Pierre Curie that she discovered her true potential. ‘They completed each other’. Not long after, the discoveries were starting to come quickly with the couple discovering radium, which ‘was important’ as it really opened the door of the nuclear age. Marie’s persistence was in the end rewarded when her and husband Pierre were awarded with the Nobel Prize in 1903.

Text Three – Poem:
c) Text Three ‘Ithaka’ is a poem written to represent the reflection that all people must make on their journey of self-discovery in order to uncover their true meaning in life. ‘You’ll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high’, represents tells of the positive mind set people must have if they are to self-discover without facing any problems. Repetition is used in the first two stanzas of the poem with the line ‘Hope your road is a long one’ in the opening lines. This further emphasises the fact that people must make a huge change in order to fully achieve reconciliation. In the fourth stanza it speaks of how Ithaka ‘has nothing left to give you now’ which express the fact that through a journey of self-discovery where one has reflected on their past and present situations, find everything they set out to find, in the form of self-change.
Text Four – Feature Article:
d) In Text Four, Lance Richardson tells his story of how he went on a journey full of negatives, only to come out the other side as a much better individual. He tells of how before he travelled he was not complete, ‘I was a