DSE 英語文學 Paper 1 模擬試題（2027 年考期）＋模擬答案、評分標準及逐題解說

A1 模擬答案：’In Rebecca, the dead have more power than the living.’ （約 380 字）

Du Maurier builds Rebecca on a paradox: the title character dies before the novel begins, yet she governs every room at Manderley. The novel opens with the narrator’s dream — ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’ — and that sentence establishes the pattern of the whole book, in which the past is more vivid, more solid and more authoritative than the present.

The most obvious instrument of the dead woman’s power is Mrs Danvers, who preserves Rebecca’s bedroom as a shrine and uses it against the second wife: the narrator is made to feel that she is occupying a life that belongs to someone else. Rebecca’s power works through objects and handwriting as much as through people — the monogrammed handkerchief, the sloping signature in a hotel register, the ‘R’ on the notepaper — so that the narrator’s own identity is constantly measured against a rival who cannot answer back.

Yet it is Maxim, not Rebecca, who gives her this power, because he refuses to speak about her. His silence is what the second wife fills with fantasy; the more he withholds, the larger Rebecca grows. When he finally confesses, the confession collapses the myth: ‘Rebecca’ becomes a corrupt and dying woman rather than a goddess. The final fire at Manderley completes that movement. The dead do have more power than the living for almost the whole novel — but the ending shows this power was manufactured by the living, and it burns with the house.

考官點評：呢篇符合 5 級水平 —— 有清晰論點（死者嘅力量係活人造出嚟）、引文精準、並處理咗題目嘅「power」一詞。要上 5**，可以再引一兩處細節（例如 Mrs Danvers 關於 Rebecca 嘅具體言論）並討論「power 係同情還是恐怖」嘅矛盾。

B1 模擬答案：’Shylock is as much a victim of Venice as he is a villain within it.’ （約 380 字）

Shakespeare makes it impossible to separate Shylock’s cruelty from the cruelty he has endured. Venice needs his money but despises his religion; the play shows this double standard before it shows the bond. Shylock’s own defence — ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ — turns the Christian rhetoric of mercy back on the court, and its force comes from the fact that it is factually true.

The bond of ‘an equal pound of your fair flesh’ is, however, genuinely monstrous, and Shakespeare does not soften it: Shylock sharpens his knife in open court and refuses every offer of repayment. If he is a victim, he is also a man who has chosen revenge over the mercy he has so often been denied — and the play insists that he was taught this lesson by Antonio’s insults and Jessica’s betrayal.

What finally condemns Venice rather than Shylock is the sentence. The court strips him of his wealth and forces his conversion, then treats this as mercy: Gratiano’s jeering at a broken man shows the Christians winning in the least Christian way possible. Portia’s ‘The quality of mercy is not strained’ is true as an idea and hollow as a practice.

Shylock is therefore both villain and victim because Venice creates the conditions for both. The play neither acquits nor excuses him; it exposes the society that demands his conversion while never accepting him.

考官點評：關鍵係「both」字 —— 5** 會再處理文本內部矛盾（例如 Jessica 偷走戒指嘅殘忍細節，同 Shylock 早年嘅「I would my daughter were dead at my foot」並置）。

C1 模擬答案：反諷（irony）如何揭露角色看不見的真相（約 380 字）

Both stories end with a reversal that punishes a character for the very knowledge he or she believes to possess, but the writers place the irony differently.

Dahl’s irony is structural and dramatic: the reader understands before Boggis does that he has talked himself out of a fortune. By insisting the commode is ‘firewood’ except for its legs, Boggis gives the farmer the logic that destroys the treasure — the men saw the legs off and chop up the rest before he returns. The story’s comedy is the comedy of self-defeat: the trickster is beaten by his own script, and the reader’s pleasure lies in seeing the trap close on the man who set it.

Chopin’s irony is quieter and works against the reader’s expectation. Mrs Mallard’s ‘Free! Body and soul free!’ is not presented as wickedness but as liberation, and the story refuses to punish her for it until the doctor’s final diagnosis: she dies ‘of heart disease — of joy that kills’. The irony is that her death is misread even as it is recorded: the freedom that killed her is named as joy.

Both writers therefore expose a gap between what characters perceive and what their worlds assume. Dahl’s gap is moral and comic, aimed at Boggis’s greed and at the rural family’s innocence; Chopin’s gap is social, aimed at the institution of marriage and at the medical language that closes over a woman’s inner life. In both, irony is not decoration but the argument itself.

考官點評：比較題最重要係「同一比較軸」：此答案用「反諷對付邊個」作軸。要衝 5**，可加一句講兩個反諷嘅性質差異（Dahl 屬戲劇反諷／讀者早知，Chopin 屬結局反諷／讀者同被騙）。