Section II prompts

ACER used to make a clear split between Task A and Task B quotes. Over the last few years that line has become more and more blurred, so to match the real exam I haven't split these into Task A and Task B.

These are the instructions you'll see in the exam:

Consider the following comments and develop a piece of writing in response to one or more of them. Your writing will be judged on the quality of your response to the theme; how well you organise and present your point of view, and how effectively you express yourself.

Set 1

• “When you forgive, you in no way change the past, but you sure do change the future.” (Bernard Meltzer)
• “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” (Alexander Pope)
• “Prejudice is sinful. All blood flows red. And the most harmful and foolish kind of prejudice is prejudice against yourself.” (Jewell Parker Rhodes)
• “Forgive yourself for your faults and your mistakes and move on.” (Les Brown)
• “Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” (Mark Twain)

Set 2

• “Cats are the connoisseurs of comfort” (James Herriot)
• “Until one has loved an animal a part of one’s soul remains unawakened” (Anatole France)
• “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats” (Albert Schweitzer)
• “An animal’s eye have the power to speak a great language” (Martin Buber)
• “This cat isn’t mad. He’s the most intelligent of his kind I’ve ever met.” (Sirius Black)

Set 3

• “Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of.” (Charles Richards)
• “Everyone is just waiting” (Dr. Seuss)
• “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” (Abraham Lincoln)
• “We must use time as a tool, not as a couch” (John F. Kennedy)
• “You Only Live Once”

Set 4

• “Confidence is silent. Insecurities are loud!” (Jane Curnow)
• “In fact, confidence of the people is worth more than money.” (Carter G. Woodson)
• “Confidence is contagious. So is a lack of confidence.” (Vince Lombardi)
• “Confidence is a very fragile thing.” (Joe Montana)
• “Confidence is preparation. Everything else is beyond your control.” (Richard Kline)

Set 5

• “Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.”
• “The most sophisticated software in existence is tasked with figuring out how to keep you from leaving a website.” (Hank Green)
• “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (Dr. Herbert A. Simon)
• “Your life is controlled by what you focus on.” (Tony Robbins)
• “Focus and simplicity: once you get there you can move mountains.” (Steven Jobs)

Set 6

• “The power of social media is that it forces necessary change.” (Erik Qualman)
• “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet just because there is a picture next to it.” (Julius Caesar)
• “Whoever controls the media controls the mind.” (Jim Morrison)
• “The Crooked Media!” (Donald J. Trump)
• “Without a free and independent media, true democracy is unattainable.” (Warren Christopher)

Set 7

• “Don’t ever call me mad, Mycroft. I’m not mad. I’m just … well, differently moral-ed, that’s all.” (Jasper Fforde)
• “The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.” (George Orwell)
• “You’re not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more, it’s speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons.” (Terry Pratchett)
• “Those who make conversation impossible, make escalation inevitable.” (Stefan Molyneux)
• “The truth has become an insult.” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

Set 8

• “Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.” (E. F. Schumacher)
• “No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need.” (Karl Marx)
• “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” (Abraham Lincoln)
• “Everything in excess is opposed to nature.” (Hippocrates)
• “Don’t use a lot where a little will do.” (Proverb)

Set 9

• “Privacy is dead, and social media holds the smoking gun.” (Pete Cashmore)
• “Getting information from the internet is like taking a drink from a hydrant.” (Mitchell Kapor)
• “Privacy is not something that I’m merely entitled to, it’s an absolute prerequisite.” (Marlon Brando)
• “If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it too.” (Tim Cook)
• “Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone’s information is out there, it’s part of the collective.” (Craig Venter)

Set 10

• “Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.” (Maya Angelou)
• “To bring about change, you must not be afraid to take the first step. We will fail when we fail to try.” (Rosa Parks)
• “Activism is my rent for living on the planet.” (Alice Walker)
• “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” (James Baldwin)
• “Excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism.” (Oprah Winfrey)

Set 11

• “Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves” (Robert Kennedy)
• “Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.” (Aristotle)
• “The fraudster’s greatest liability is the certainty that the fraud is too clever to be detected.” (Louis J. French)
• “The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.” (Bess Myerson)
• “The more corrupt the state, the more laws.” (Tacitus)

Set 12

• “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” (John F. Kennedy)
• “My first world is humanity. My second world is humanism. And, I live in the third world being merely a human.” (Santosh Kalwar)
• “People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.” (Ha-Joon Chang)
• “Liberation for who does not have a shack and freedom for who does not know how to live is fatal.” (Alireza Salehi Nejad)
• “A developed nation is also an expensive nation.” (Amit Kalantri)

Set 13

• “The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.” (Howard Luck Gossage)
• “Advertising is legalized lying.” (H. G. Wells)
• “Telling lies does not work in advertising.” (Tim Bell)
• “If you want to understand how a lion hunts, don’t go to the zoo. Go to the jungle.” (Jim Stengel)
• “Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.” (John Edson)

Set 14

• “I trust bitcoin more than I trust my bank,” (Adam Draper)
• “The true currency of life is time, not money, and we’ve all got a limited stock of that.” (Robert Harris)
• “The money you make is a symbol of the value you create.” (Idowu Koyenikan)
• “All the money you made will never buy back your soul.” (Bob Dylan)
• “Money is not the only answer, but it makes a difference.” (Barack Obama)

Set 15

• “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” (Neil Armstrong)
• “I see Earth! It is so beautiful.” (Yuri Gagarin)
• “I’m convinced that before the year 2000 is over, the first child will have been born on the moon.” (Wernher Von Braun)
• “Gravity hurts.” (Viktor Alexandrov)
• “Things aren’t scary. People are scared.” (Chris Hadfield)

Set 16

• “There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.” (John Green)
• “You look at me and cry; everything hurts. I hold you and whisper: but everything can heal.” (Rupi Kaur)
• “Mental health problems don’t define who you are. They are something you experience.” (Matt Haig)
• “Tough times never last, but tough people do!” (Robert Schuller)
• “I really want to talk to someone about my thoughts and feelings but I can’t.” (Anonymous)

Set 17

• “Man is the only animal that fouls its own nest.” (Anonymous)
• “Be a part of the solution not part of the pollution” (Anonymous)
• “Visual pollution is more poisonous than any other pollution because it kills the soul.” (Friedensreich Hundertwasser)
• “Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.” (William Ruckelshaus)
• “It is the worst of times but it is the best of times because we still have a chance.” (Sylvia Earle)

Set 18

• “Those who lose dreaming are lost” (Australian Aboriginal Proverb)
• “The land owns us.” (Australian Aboriginal Proverb)
• “We are all indigenous people on this planet, and we have to reorganize to get along.” (Rebecca Adamson)
• “If people can’t acknowledge the wisdom of indigenous cultures, then that’s their loss.” (Jay Griffiths)
• “Indigenous people believe that Man belongs to the World; civilized people believe that the World belongs to Man.” (Daniel Quinn)

Set 19

• “There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.” (Mayor Mitch Ladrieu)
• “Their refusal to remove their monuments is at the expense of black lives and our dignity.” (Maya Little)
• “I don’t fear 150-year-old statues of old dead white men. What I fear is the hatred we see in real time in 2017 and on social media and in our political rhetoric.” (Sophia A. Nelson)
• “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” (George Orwell)
• “Should we be rewriting history just to make people feel good? That’s not history, that’s psychiatry.” (Edward I. Koch)

Set 20

• “I have to be seen to be believed.” (Queen Elizabeth II)
• “To alter the Constitution to establish the Commonwealth of Australia as a republic with the Queen and Governor-General being replaced by a President appointed by a two-thirds majority of the members of the Commonwealth Parliament. Do you approve this proposed alteration?” (1999 Australian referendum question)
• “Something as curious as the monarchy won’t survive unless you take account of people’s attitudes. After all, if people don’t want it, they won’t have it.” (Prince Charles)
• “I’d like to be a queen in people’s hearts” (Princess Diana)
• “When it comes to the British monarchy, I prefer to be seduced by an image than presented with a real person.” (Damien Hirst)