Adapted from "Yuckberry Picking"
Limestone. It's marvellous stuff. And it crops up in the most unusual places. Your
toothpaste contains limestone; so does the plastic dashboard of your car; high quality
paper contains tiny amounts of limestone; and farmers put it on their fields to
'sweeten' the soil. It's also responsible for the remarkable landscape and caves at
(5) Waitomo, an hour south of Hamilton.
Nick Andreef's company, Waitomo Adventures, takes visitors into the dark zones
beneath Waitomo. No sedentary glow-worm outings these. A Waitomo Adventures
excursion is a full-on caving trip. Nick has a hypothesis he calls "the yuckberry
theory", which somehow makes sense of our need for escapades like this.
(10) "A yuckberry," he says, "is the fruit of the subconscious. It is a hard kernel made of
quite understandable and natural apprehensions, such as fear of falling, fear of the
dark and fear of enclosed spaces. But around the seed is an amorphous mass of
superstition, exaggeration and illogical worries. This is the flesh of the yuckberry and
it serves to make the kernel seem bigger than it really is.
(15) It's our job to peel away the flesh of the yuckberry, by letting people confront some
of their fears. That exposes the seed for what it is: a tiny, insignificant theing that can
be thrown away."
The expedition started in an incongruous location: a disused woolshed on a hilltop
near Waitomo township. In the wool-and-dag-scented shed we donned
(20) wetsuits, gumboots, abseil harnesses and caving helmets equipped with lights. Then it
was a ten minute squelch down to the cave entrance.
In the space of a few minutes we had moved from the ordinary - rolling hills, grazing
cattle, bushy gullies - to the extraordinary. A climbing rope dangled form a steel frame
over the hole. Darkness swallowed the meagre beam from my helmet light. I looked
(25) into the abyss. The abyss looked back. One by one we clipped onto the rope and
swung out into space, to explore the Haggis Honking Holes. Stretched out like
tapeworms we crawled into the Gut.
The adventure lasted three hours. During that time we mentally ticked off our
yuckberry fears. Scared of heights? Too late to worry about then when you are
(30) halfway down a 30m waterfall. Claustrophobic? Try not to think about the oppressive
crush of limestone above. Afraid of the dark? Darkness is a concept: there's nothing in
the dark that ain't there in the light. SO, you just might find your yuckberry pip, pluck it
out and chuck it away forever.
Questions:
1. Identify one example of personification in lines 22-27 (A)
2. Explain what the sentence "No sedentary glow-worm outings these" (line 7) is suggesting about the Waitomo Adventure excursion (A/M/E)
3. In lines 1, 8, 32 and 33 the writer uses the words "marvellous stuff", "full-on", "ain't", "chuck it away". Explain why you think the writer has used these colloquial words (A/M/E)
ANSWERS
(NCEA Level 1 English revision guide. 2006 edition, Really Useful Resources, pg. 41)
toothpaste contains limestone; so does the plastic dashboard of your car; high quality
paper contains tiny amounts of limestone; and farmers put it on their fields to
'sweeten' the soil. It's also responsible for the remarkable landscape and caves at
(5) Waitomo, an hour south of Hamilton.
Nick Andreef's company, Waitomo Adventures, takes visitors into the dark zones
beneath Waitomo. No sedentary glow-worm outings these. A Waitomo Adventures
excursion is a full-on caving trip. Nick has a hypothesis he calls "the yuckberry
theory", which somehow makes sense of our need for escapades like this.
(10) "A yuckberry," he says, "is the fruit of the subconscious. It is a hard kernel made of
quite understandable and natural apprehensions, such as fear of falling, fear of the
dark and fear of enclosed spaces. But around the seed is an amorphous mass of
superstition, exaggeration and illogical worries. This is the flesh of the yuckberry and
it serves to make the kernel seem bigger than it really is.
(15) It's our job to peel away the flesh of the yuckberry, by letting people confront some
of their fears. That exposes the seed for what it is: a tiny, insignificant theing that can
be thrown away."
The expedition started in an incongruous location: a disused woolshed on a hilltop
near Waitomo township. In the wool-and-dag-scented shed we donned
(20) wetsuits, gumboots, abseil harnesses and caving helmets equipped with lights. Then it
was a ten minute squelch down to the cave entrance.
In the space of a few minutes we had moved from the ordinary - rolling hills, grazing
cattle, bushy gullies - to the extraordinary. A climbing rope dangled form a steel frame
over the hole. Darkness swallowed the meagre beam from my helmet light. I looked
(25) into the abyss. The abyss looked back. One by one we clipped onto the rope and
swung out into space, to explore the Haggis Honking Holes. Stretched out like
tapeworms we crawled into the Gut.
The adventure lasted three hours. During that time we mentally ticked off our
yuckberry fears. Scared of heights? Too late to worry about then when you are
(30) halfway down a 30m waterfall. Claustrophobic? Try not to think about the oppressive
crush of limestone above. Afraid of the dark? Darkness is a concept: there's nothing in
the dark that ain't there in the light. SO, you just might find your yuckberry pip, pluck it
out and chuck it away forever.
Questions:
1. Identify one example of personification in lines 22-27 (A)
2. Explain what the sentence "No sedentary glow-worm outings these" (line 7) is suggesting about the Waitomo Adventure excursion (A/M/E)
3. In lines 1, 8, 32 and 33 the writer uses the words "marvellous stuff", "full-on", "ain't", "chuck it away". Explain why you think the writer has used these colloquial words (A/M/E)
ANSWERS
(NCEA Level 1 English revision guide. 2006 edition, Really Useful Resources, pg. 41)