Prep- before the AQA exam

1. Assessment Objectives
AO3 (i) Read and understand texts, selecting material
appropriate to purpose, gathering information from
different sources and making comparisons and cross-
references as appropriate
AO3 (ii) Develop and sustain interpretations of writers’
ideas and perspectives
AO3 (iii) Explain and evaluate how writers use linguistic,
grammatical, structural and presentational features to
achieve effects and engage and influence the reader

2. Quick Summary
English paper
2 hours 15 minutes
2 sections - A and B
Spend 1 hour 15 minutes
on section A, 1 hour on
section B
A = Reading and analysing
3 unseen texts linked by a
common theme, idea or
concept
B = Writing - write 2 pieces
for specific audience with
specific purpose

4. At the start of the exam
Read through all the READ WHAT YOU NEED
questions in section A and • As you read the 3 texts
underline the key words remember to highlight or
in each question SO YOU underline the main points
KNOW WHAT YOU of the article (what you
SHOULD BE LOOKING FOR learn about).
WHEN READING THE • -As you read underline
EXTRACTS. language techniques
• -Write TAP at the top of • -As you read circle
the page to remind you to presentational techniques
think about Text Type,
Audience & Purpose.

5. Section A
(Reading non-fiction texts 1 hour 15 minutes)
What you have to do Tips to get a good grade
Question 1 requires you to read item 1 (text 1)
and list 4 things that you learn from the text. Keep your responses short and clear.
Question 2 will ask you to show you
understand the article by explaining one Use some quotes to show you understand -
aspect of it e.g. why is the writer so interested make at least 3-4 points with quotations to
in ………… support your response.
Question 3 will ask you to look at item 2 (text
2). You are being asked to show that you
understand the article, can spot the main This is an 8 mark question so you need to
things that you learn from the article and back make at least 8 points with short quotes.
up what you say with short quotes.

6. Section A
(Reading non-fiction texts 1 hour 15 minutes)
What you have to do Tips to get a good grade
Read the question carefully so you know
exactly what you are looking for. You need to
Question 4 will ask you to explain how the
use quotes to support your points. This
writer uses language techniques to engage
question is split into two section with each
the reader.
section focused on one aspect of the text
e.g. how it is shocking or persuasive or
informative. Remember to use the key words
of the question in your response.
Question 5 will ask you to explain how the
writer uses presentational techniques to
engage the reader. You will be given one
item and you will have to choose a second You will need to give examples from the text
one. You will be asked to focus on several to show you understand.
important presentational aspects of the texts
e.g. the use of subtitles and pictures.

7. • Before you start
writing you should
Section B (Writing non- write TAP on the top
fiction texts 1 hour) of the page to
remind you that you
need to be thinking
about:
Section B is the writing • Text Type,
section and you will • Audience
be asked to answer 2 • Purpose.
questions. You should
spend 30 minutes on This will help to guide
each question. your writing.
Remember that
question 6 is worth
more marks so do that
one first.

8. http://wildernenglish.files.wordpress.com/201
2/05/keep-calm-and-remember-your-
timings.png

9. Travel doesn’t need to cost the earth
Focus question:
• What are the main points of this article?

10. What is the worst part of the day for you? I’m willing to bet most of you would say it’s your
journey to work or to school. For may of us it’s become an ever increasing nightmare. It’s a
hassle, it’s exhausting and time consuming and worst of all it’s expensive! The problem of
course is the traffic slowing everything down and creating pollution. Traffic on Britain’s roads
has more than doubled in the past 25 years and nowhere is this more evident than in our
towns and cities during the rush hour. A recent report shows that hundreds of local
authorities in Britain break EU regulations on the emission of nitrogen dioxide which has
been linked with asthma, stunted lung growth in children and even premature death.
There has to be a solution to this early morning misery. One town in Belgium appears to have
found it. Hasselt, the fourth largest town in Belgium, had the largest congestion problem.
However this was rapidly eliminated when the town introduced free public transport for all.
Unlike British towns the priority was not traffic, but people – a philosophy which we should
certainly try to emulate . If one town in Belgium can do it, then why can’t we?
At present, public transport is unreliable and often infrequent which is why many avoid it, using
cars instead. Free, reliable and very frequent bus and train services would remove our
ridiculous dependence on the car. Free public transport would guarantee every person’s
undeniable right to mobility – from schoolchildren to workers, the disabled and the
unemployed, families and young people. There would be a decrease in risks to health and
surely much welcomed improvements for businesses as more people shop in traffic – and
congestion – free streets. Traffic chaos would be eliminated once and for all and that fume-
spewing monster, the car, would be banished from the streets of our towns. The result of
free public transport would be a dramatic increase in cutting vehicle emissions and global
warming. All it would take is a little bit of nerve for town councils across the land to say ‘No
more cars in our town.’ So why don’t they do it now?

11. Musician and activist Bob Geldof describing his
experience of the 1984 Ethiopian famine
All day I had been on the phone trying to promote a single from the
• Focus question: album. I went home in a state of blank resignation and switched on
What was Bob the television. But there I saw something that completely changed
Geldolf’s reaction my perspective.
to the news The news report was of famine in Ethopia. From the first seconds it was
broadcast about clear that this was a horror on a monumental scale. The pictures
the Ethiopian were of people who were so shrunken by starvation that they
famine? looked like beings from another planet. Their arms and legs were as
thin aFocus question: What was Bob Geldolf’s reaction to the
news broadcast about the Ethiopian famine?
s sticks, their bodies spindly. Swollen veins and huge blankly staring
eyes protruded from their swollen heads. The camera wandered
around them like a mesmerised observer, occasionally dwelling on
one person so that he looked directly at me, sitting comfortably in
my living room. And there were children, their bodies as fragile and
vulnerable as premature babies but with the consciousness of what
is happening to them gleaming dully from their eyes. All around
was the murmur of death like a hoarse whisper, or the buzzing of
flies.

12. Musician and activist Bob Geldof describing his
experience of the 1984 Ethiopian famine
From the first few seconds it was clear that this was a tragedy which
• Focus question: the world had somehow contrived not to notice until it had reached
What was Bob a scale which constituted an international scandal. You could hear
Geldolf’s that in the tones of BBC reporter Michael Buerk. It was the voice of
reaction to the a man who was registering despair, grief and disgust at what he was
news broadcast seeing. At the end the newscaster remained silent. Paula burst into
about the tears and then rushed upstairs to check on our baby Fifi, who was
Ethiopian sleeping peacefully in her cot.
famine? The images played and replayed in my mind. What could I do? Did not
the sheer scale of the thing call for something more? A horror like
this could not occur today without our consent. We had allowed
this to happen. I would send money. But that was not enough. I had
to withdraw my consent. What else could I do? I was only a pop
singer – and by now not a very successful pop singer. All I could do
was make records no one brought. But I would do that, I would give
the profit of the next Rats record to Oxfam.
What good would that do? It would be a pitiful amount. And I would
withdraw my consent. Yet that was not enough.

13. Extract from 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (1937) Written by George OrwellIn his
non-fiction work the writer shares his opinions of the industrial cities in the
north of ENgland during the economic depression of the 1930s
I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All
round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north,
through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you
could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke.
The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed
by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-
heaps in the distance, stretched the ‘flashes’—pools of stagnant
water that had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of
ancient pits. It was horribly cold. The ‘flashes’ were covered with ice
the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in
sacks, the lock gates wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from which
vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale,
ice, mud, ashes, and foul water.

14. Extract from 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (1937) Written by George OrwellIn his
non-fiction work the writer shares his opinions of the industrial cities in the
north of England during the economic depression of the 1930s
But even Wigan is beautiful compared with Sheffield.
Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the
ugliest town in the Old World.
One scene especially lingers in my mind. A frightful patch
of waste ground (somehow, up there, a patch of waste
ground attains a squalor that would be impossible even
in London) trampled bare of grass and littered with
newspapers and old saucepans. To the right an isolated
row of gaunt four-roomed houses, dark red, blackened
by smoke. To the left an interminable vista of factory
chimneys, chimney beyond chimney, fading away into a
dim blackish haze.

15. Example Student Analysis
• George Orwell begins his description in a very negative way. When
he says: ‘I remember a dreadful afternoon’, the word ‘dreadful’
makes me think he does not have happy memories of the place he
is about to describe. This is confirmed when he begins to write in
detail about his visit to Wigan. The landscape described is almost
alien – ‘a lunar landscape’ from which ‘vegetation has been
banished’. He selects unpleasant details such as ‘mountains of slag’
and pools of ‘stagnant water’ to encourage readers to share his
opinion. He seems surprised by the ugliness of the landscape and
yet at the same time the detail in which he writes about it possibly
sug gests he is also fascinated by it. Perhaps he has not seen a city
in the north of England before. I wonder why he went on to visit
Sheffield which he describes as the ‘ugliest town in the Old World.’

16. Section B - writing Below are three
practice questions for section B.
1. Write a letter to your local council
persuading them to build a new shopping
centre
2. Write a letter to your head teacher advising
him/her how to improve morale amongst
the student body.
3. Write an article for inclusion in the National
Wildlife Magazine explaining how people
can do more to help the environment

17. Question: Write a letter to your head teacher advising
him/her how to improve morale amongst the student
body.
Dear Miss Tinderbox,
Ask any teacher what the most important aspect of teaching is and they will
unhesitatingly respond with the three R’s: results, results, results! Now, it might be
the case that a student’s academic success is also very closely related to the
enduring future of a school, but isn’t there something just a little depressing about
school’s relentless, all-consuming obsession with exam results? Look around you
and what would you expect to see in the bright young faces of your students, the
bright young faces of the next generation? You might be tempted to say ‘hope’ or
maybe ‘ambition’, but look into the faces of your students and what do you see?
The answer will shock you: the cold, empty expression of someone suffering from
advanced nervous exhaustion. It’s a sad, but unfortunately true fact of life at our
school that so many bright young people are being pushed, driven even towards
the edge. True, you supply us with a wonderful array of after school activities, but
who has time to attend them when we have homework set each day across all
subject areas? Morale is at an all time low and with winter just settling in things
can only get worse, or will they? If we act quickly there may still be time to
resuscitate the life and ambition of these poor wretches, but we need your help
now!

18. Question: Write an article for inclusion in the National Wildlife
Magazine explaining how people can do more to help the
environment
Stop! Look! Think Green!
It’s easy to be wasteful, far too easy in fact, and that’s precisely the problem we face as a highly
productive but massively wasteful species. One could even argue that the driving purpose behind
many of the technological and scientific breakthroughs of the last two centuries, and probably
beyond, has been to make life just that little bit more comfortable. But no sooner have we nested
down into our luxurious leather sofa, flicked on the 72” widescreen and reached for an extra large
bucket of buttery popcorn than some fool is screaming in our ear that we need to start thinking
about the environmental cost of all this comfort and good living. At first it might shock you to
realise that pretty everything you own has cost the environment in some way and that you, yes you,
are contributing to the gradually increasing collapse of life on Earth. Then again, X-Factor is on in a
minute you’ll be dead before the ice caps melt, so really, who cares, am I right? Wrong! This is an
issue which affects every living thing clinging to this planet, and of the billions of different animal
species scratching out an existence on this planet, only one is threatening to ruin the party of
everything, and that’s you and me I’m afraid.
Michael Lambert, Professor of zoology at Stanford University has called human wastefulness ‘a tax on all
life, everywhere’, and has described our current wasteful behaviour as ‘not my problem syndrome’.
Now, I don’t want you to throw this article down and immediately swap all your fancy DFS furniture
for wicker, hand woven man-baskets, not do I want you to announce to your assembled family that
you are all going to live up a tree from now on, I just want to you start reflecting your ecological
bank balance as if it actually was your bank balance and you just three withdrawals away from
bankruptcy, because then you would probably listen..