Baccalauréat Anglais LV1 2007...

This week is the return of this part of the season when the French high-school seniors (about 517,000 of them) take their big graduation exam that students must pass in order to go to college and university – it is called le bacclauréat /bakalore'a/ or le bac in colloquial French (More details in our post here).

NOTE: by the way, the name is derived from the latin bacca laurea which means "laurel berry", from the time when ancient Greeks and Romans honored scholars and poets with garlands from the bay laurel tree.

To give you an idea, here’s what some of the students had for their English exam today, read what follows. (This is a written exam of English after 7 years of learning it as a foreign language in French schools.). They had 3 hours to answer the questions on the text and for the essay.

The text chosen for the exam is an extract from a novel (March) by Geraldine Brooks (a Pulitzer Prize-winning, Australian-American journalist and author).

To read the following items, click on each page.