Leaving Cert 2007 - Maths and Irish Papers 1

After being relatively pleased with my English exam, my nerves were settled for yet another full day of exams. The night before saw some last minute preparation for the subjects with a focus on Maths as it’s my subject of the two and I’ve always been told that “you have to work hard to fail Irish”.

Maths paper one (OL) was our first exam of the day and when I turned over the paper I was relieved to see an easy Arithmetic question, its most taxing task was having to calculate the hours worked by a worker in a day. I think I spent more time being jealous over the amount of money he earned than I spent actually doing the question! There were surprisingly easy parts to some of the questions and nothing was really too complicated. A nice paper overall, I just hope Paper II will be as accessible.

Irish paper one (OL) was a a very nice paper. For the first time in a long time in a paper, I understood the comprehensions which always helps when you’re answering 10 questions on them each worth 4%! The essay titles were all nice and liberal, I chose to write about Saturday nights being my favourite night and my father winning the lottery. I managed to reach the recommended word count on each and although my standard of Irish is pretty bad in parts, I’m hopeful that I picked up marks worthy of a good C1 in the paper!

The aural directly followed the Irish paper (well, after a 1 hour lay about in the Sun) and it wasn’t too bad. The supervisor commented on there being a few difficult parts for Ordinary Level and I would have to agree. There was one question in particular that I was totally lost for, ‘Comhra Dó”. I was waiting to hear the title of a book for the 2nd question and suddenly realised that the conversation had moved onto the 4th question! Apart from that, I can’t really complain about it and I’m glad that I will never have to listen to that deplorable Ulster accent EVER again… unless I flick over to Ros na Rún that is!

It’s paper two tomorrow, the prose and poetry paper, which is worth a mere 17% of the overall exam. I’m not going to cry myself to sleep over my lack of preparation and will probably just look at “An Gealt” which is the most tipped of poems to be on the paper!


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