HPAT Practice Questions: Section 2 - Interpersonal Understanding

Questions 1–2

The following passage concerns Eimear and her older brother, Cian. Their father died four months ago. They are clearing his workshop because their mother has decided to sell the family home.

Cian arrived with flattened boxes, marker pens and a roll of black rubbish bags. Before taking off his coat, he wrote TOOLS, KEEP and CHARITY on three boxes and placed them in a row beside the door.

“If we decide object by object, we will still be here at Christmas,” he said.

It was the same tone Cian had used at the hospital when the consultant asked whether the family understood what was happening: calm, almost brisk, as if understanding were a task that could be completed and crossed off. In the weeks after the funeral he had cancelled the newspaper, spoken to the solicitor and arranged for a gardener to visit their mother. Whenever Eimear thanked him, he said somebody had to do it. Whenever she asked how he was, he answered with the next item on his list.

Eimear nodded, although it was only March. She began with the jars on the shelf above the workbench. Her father had kept screws according to sizes that made sense only to him. She lifted each jar, wiped the circular mark beneath it and returned it to exactly the same place.

“Those are going,” Cian said without looking up.

“I am cleaning them.”

“You are cleaning things we are throwing away.”

“Someone might want them.”

Cian held up a jar containing three bent nails. Eimear laughed despite herself, and for a moment he did too. He emptied the nails into the rubbish bag but placed the jar in the charity box.

They worked without speaking for nearly an hour. Cian tested each drill before winding its cable neatly around the handle. Eimear found an old radio beneath a dust sheet and switched it on. A burst of static filled the workshop, followed by half a song their father used to whistle badly. Cian reached past her and turned it off.

“The batteries will have leaked,” he said.

“It was playing.”

“For now.” He removed the batteries, wrapped them in a scrap of newspaper and placed the radio beside the tools. It was the first object that did not go into any of the labelled boxes.

Later, behind a stack of timber, Eimear found a small stool with only three legs attached. Their father had begun making it for Cian’s daughter, Maeve, before he became ill. Pencil marks remained on the unfinished fourth corner.

“Maeve will not remember he promised it,” Cian said.

“That is not the same as it not mattering.”

He ran his thumb across the pencil marks. “It is not safe. It was never finished.”

“We could ask someone to finish it.”

“Then it would be something someone else made.”

Eimear looked at him. Cian seemed surprised by his own answer. He examined the fourth corner again, then said that their mother would be waiting for them to come in for lunch.

Eimear turned away and began writing KITCHEN on a box that already had KITCHEN written on two sides. When she looked back, the stool was in the keep box. Cian had placed a folded cloth over it before returning to the workbench.

Questions 5–6

The following passage concerns Sana and Ruth, who work for a community housing organisation. Both applied for the position of project manager. Sana was appointed two weeks ago. Ruth, who has worked in the organisation longer, now reports to her. No one had discussed the appointment directly. Ruth congratulated Sana in the staff kitchen, then returned to her desk before the celebratory cake was cut.

Their first major task was to present a proposal for two neighbourhood support centres. Ruth had developed the original service model and collected most of the local data. Sana had converted the material into a presentation, shortened several sections and rearranged the financial information. On the evening before the meeting Ruth emailed a version containing tracked changes. Sana opened it on her phone while travelling home, saw that there were more than forty comments and decided to review them in the morning. An urgent call from the finance director prevented her from doing so.

At the meeting Ruth sat at the far end of the table and made notes while Sana presented. Sana had rehearsed every transition, but halfway through a committee member questioned the projected number of families who would use the service.

“It says 180 here,” he said, tapping the printed proposal, “but your slide says 240.”

Sana looked at the screen. Before she could answer, Ruth said, “The slide includes the second site. The written proposal was submitted before that site was confirmed.” She turned to Sana rather than to the committee member. “The revised breakdown is in Appendix C.”

Sana found the appendix and continued. For the rest of the meeting she noticed each time Ruth looked up from her notes. When a committee member praised the project’s consultation process, Sana said that the work had been a team effort, but she did not name Ruth. The committee approved the next stage of the proposal.

Afterwards, Sana waited until the others had left.

“You could have warned me about the discrepancy,” she said.

Ruth closed her notebook. “I put a note beside the figure in the version I sent you.”

“And when I missed it, you corrected me in front of everyone.”

“I answered their question.”

“You made it look as though you knew the proposal better than I did.”

Ruth was quiet for a moment. “I do know parts of it better. I wrote them.”

Sana pushed the committee papers into alignment. “This is exactly the kind of thing I was worried about.”

“What kind of thing?”

“You know what I mean.”

Ruth picked up her notebook, then put it down again. “I wanted the proposal to survive the meeting. Not everything I do is about the job you got.”

On the train home Sana reread Ruth’s tracked changes. Most corrected outdated figures or identified questions that the committee had subsequently asked. Beside one slide Ruth had written: This is clearer than my version. Sana stopped at that comment before closing the document.

The following morning Ruth emailed Sana a list of every figure that had changed since the original submission. The message contained no greeting, but the list was complete. Sana typed, Thank you—this is useful, deleted the sentence, and forwarded the list to the finance director without replying.

Questions 7–8

The following passage concerns Maeve and her friend Orla. After the end of a long relationship, Orla has been staying in Maeve’s spare room while looking for somewhere else to live.

During the first week Orla moved through the flat lightly, as though every object might record that she had touched it. She folded the blanket each morning and placed it at the foot of the bed. She bought her own milk, although Maeve’s fridge already held two unopened cartons, and carried it home in a separate bag.

Maeve tried to make the arrangement ordinary. She left two mugs beside the kettle and complained about work in the same untidy way she always had. Orla listened, asked careful questions and never mentioned the boxes still stacked in the boot of her car. When mutual friends called, she asked Maeve not to tell them where she was staying. “I do not want people organising themselves around me,” she said. Maeve replied that nobody was likely to reorganise an entire life, but Orla did not laugh.

By the third week, she had repaired the loose hinge on the bathroom cabinet, reorganised the shelf beneath the sink and begun leaving dinner in the oven on evenings when Maeve worked late.

“You know you do not have to earn the room,” Maeve said one night.

Orla continued slicing carrots. “I know.”

“Then stop behaving as if I am conducting an inspection.”

“Your bathroom door was falling off.”

“It had been falling off for four years. I was attached to it that way.”

Orla smiled, but the knife moved more quickly against the board.

Maeve remembered that same quick movement from university, when Orla would erase a drawing rather than let anyone see that the proportions were wrong. Back then, Maeve had admired what she called Orla’s independence. Now the word seemed less flattering. She wanted to say that needing somewhere to sleep was not a failure of character, but she knew Orla would hear the sentence as evidence that Maeve had been thinking exactly that.

When Maeve suggested that Orla could stay until summer, Orla asked whether she wanted rent. Maeve said no. Orla asked again the following day, this time with a figure written on a piece of paper. Maeve refused more firmly.

For several days afterwards Orla became excessively cheerful. She bought flowers for the kitchen and replaced a saucepan Maeve had burned years earlier. Maeve began to feel that each gift was part of an argument she had somehow agreed to conduct without speaking.

At the end of the month, Maeve found an envelope beneath the blue bowl in the hallway. It contained half the amount Orla had proposed and a note: For food, electricity and the preservation of our friendship.

Maeve carried the envelope to the spare room, intending to return it. Orla was asleep on top of the bedclothes, still wearing her work clothes, one hand closed around her phone. An estate agent’s webpage glowed on the screen.

Maeve stood in the doorway, then went back to the hallway. She placed the envelope in the drawer beneath the blue bowl. The next morning she asked Orla whether she wanted to view a flat together on Saturday. Neither of them mentioned the money.

On Saturday the first flat was smaller than the photographs and smelled of damp. Orla walked through it measuring walls with her eyes. Maeve criticised the windows, the rent and the distance from the bus stop until Orla said, “You do realise you are meant to help me find somewhere?” Maeve answered, “I am helping you find somewhere decent.” Orla looked as though she might object, then wrote the agent’s number in her notebook. On the way home she bought two coffees and allowed Maeve to pay for both.

Questions 9–10

The following passage concerns Yusuf, a seventeen-year-old violinist, and Elena, who has taught him for six years. Yusuf has been selected to audition for a youth orchestra. Recently, however, he has missed two lessons and arrived unprepared for a third.

At the beginning of the lesson Elena placed the audition music on the stand but did not open it.

“Are you still planning to audition?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Then play the second movement from the beginning.”

Yusuf adjusted the music twice. After sixteen bars he stopped.

“I know it,” he said.

“You know where the notes are.”

“Is there a difference?”

Elena closed the music. “There will be to the panel.”

Before the orchestra invitation, Yusuf had been the student who arrived early and played scales in the corridor. He used to argue for difficult pieces and laugh when Elena said his enthusiasm was running several bars ahead of his technique. Since receiving the audition date, he had begun asking how many candidates would attend, how old they were and whether the panel knew which schools they came from. Elena answered when she could, then stopped answering when she understood that information was not what he wanted.

Yusuf began putting his violin away. Elena had seen him angry before, but his careful movements concerned her more than anger would have done.

“If you have changed your mind, say so,” she said.

“You said this audition could change everything.”

“It could.”

“My mother has told everyone at work. My uncle has booked a minibus.”

Elena waited.

Outside the practice room a younger student began a scale, lost the key halfway through and started again. Yusuf looked towards the door. “They think I am being modest when I ask them not to come,” he said. “My mother says I should be proud that people believe in me.”

“And are you?”

“Proud?” He considered the word as if Elena had asked him to identify a note played in another room. “I was, at first.”

“They have made it into proof,” Yusuf continued. “If I get in, all the lessons and lifts and money were worth it. If I do not—”

“If you do not, they will be disappointed.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“No,” Elena said. “It is not.”

She thought of telling him that one audition could not carry the meaning his family had given it. The statement would be true, but at that moment truth offered from outside seemed too light for the weight he was describing. Instead, she asked him to take the violin out again.

She removed the audition music and replaced it with a duet they had played when Yusuf was thirteen.

“What are you doing?”

“For the next ten minutes, nothing depends on how well you play.”

Yusuf looked at the familiar first page. “That sounds like a trick.”

“Probably. Start when you are ready.”

He did not lift the violin immediately, but he took it out of its case again.

Elena played the opening phrase alone. Yusuf entered two bars late, stopped and shook his head. She began again without comment. This time he entered in the right place. His sound was cautious, then warmer as the melody passed between them. When they reached the end, he kept the bow above the string.

“Again?” Elena asked.

Yusuf glanced at the audition music lying face down on the table. “Once more,” he said, turning back to the duet.