AQA GCSE English Language: Paper 2 Q4: Comparing Viewpoints

Source A — from "Letters on the Iron Road", by Augustus Pellew-Sharma, 1846.

I confess I approached the new railway as one approaches a wild beast that has been promised to be tame. We took our seats in the carriage with a kind of grim resolution, as if we were to be fired from a cannon, and indeed the speed, when it came, was little short of a violence. The fields did not pass; they were torn away. A man cannot think at such a pace; the mind is left some miles behind the body, and arrives, breathless and offended, only at the station. There is, besides, a deeper objection. This contrivance will make the whole kingdom small. The honest distance that once protected a county from the follies of the capital is to be annihilated, and every town reduced to a suburb of London. We are promised that we shall save hours. I ask: to do what? A man who arrives everywhere quickly has, in my observation, nowhere worth arriving at, and nothing to say when he does. I shall keep to my horse, which has never yet exceeded the speed of thought, and has carried me, these thirty years, to every place I ever truly wished to be.

Source B — from "Why I Love the 06:42", a blog post by Yusuf Brannigan-Okoro, 2024.

People pity me when I tell them I commute two hours a day by train, and I have stopped correcting them, because the truth sounds smug. The truth is that those two hours are the best of my day. At home there are children, dishes, the relentless small emergencies of a life I love but cannot hear myself think inside. On the 06:42 there is a window seat, a flask, and a rule I have made for myself: no work until the second station. So I watch instead. I have watched the same fields turn from black to gold to white across a year, the same heron stand in the same flooded ditch as though it were paid to. I read more books on that train in a month than I once managed in a year. The carriage is not, as the old writers feared, a place where thought is impossible. It is the one place left where thought is undisturbed. We were sold the train as a way of getting somewhere faster. For me it has become, quietly, the place I least want to leave.

For this question, you need to refer to the whole of Source A together with Source B. Compare how the two writers convey their different attitudes towards train travel. In your answer, you could: compare their different attitudes; compare the methods they use to convey those attitudes; support your response with references to both texts. (16 marks)

Source A — from "A Word on the Education of Girls", by the Reverend Josiah Tranter-Vale, 1871.

It is asked, with increasing boldness, whether the daughters of respectable families ought to be furnished with the same instruction as their brothers. I answer, with all kindness, that they ought not. The female mind, delicate and quick, is admirably suited to the lighter accomplishments — to music, to a little French, to the management of a household and the soothing of a husband's cares. To burden it with Latin, with mathematics, with the harsh contentions of the sciences, is not to elevate the girl but to unsettle her, and to render her unfit for the very sphere in which her happiness, and ours, must lie. Nature herself has marked out separate provinces for the sexes, and she does not consult our modern enthusiasms when she does so. Let the boy be sent out to wrestle with the world. Let the girl be kept, as a lamp is kept, to give light and warmth within the home. To wish her otherwise is no kindness; it is to quarrel with Providence, and to make her wretched in the bargain.

Source B — from "What My Grandmother Was Denied", an article by Priti Hollingsworth-Bahl, 2022.

My grandmother could have run a company. I know this because she ran everything else: a household of nine, a war-time allotment, a street's worth of neighbours' quarrels, the books for my grandfather's failing shop, which failed rather less once she quietly took them over. She left school at twelve. Not because she was slow — she was the sharpest person I have ever known — but because a girl's schooling was thought a waste of a desk a boy might use. She taught herself everything: French from a borrowed book, arithmetic from the market, history from the radio she was not supposed to listen to while she worked. When I graduated, she sat in the front row and cried, and afterwards she said one thing I will never forget: "They told us our minds were small so they wouldn't have to make room for them." She was not bitter. She was something fiercer than bitter. She was evidence. Every certificate I have ever earned, I have earned for two.

For this question, you need to refer to the whole of Source A together with Source B. Compare how the two writers convey their different perspectives on the education of girls. In your answer, you could: compare their different perspectives; compare the methods they use to convey those perspectives; support your response with references to both texts. (16 marks)

Source A — from "On the Keeping of Wild Creatures", by Miss Henrietta Caldwell-Roost, 1888.

I am told that my menagerie is the talk of the county, and I do not deny that I am proud of it. In the conservatory I keep two parrots from the Indies, a small monkey of a melancholy disposition, and a tortoise of, I am assured, great antiquity. Visitors are charmed. The children of the parish are brought to gaze, and the monkey, dressed by my maid in a little velvet coat, performs his tricks to general delight. I cannot understand the sour few who suggest there is cruelty in the thing. Are these creatures not warm, and fed, and admired? Would the monkey be happier in some fever-ridden jungle, prey to every passing snake? I think not. We have lifted these animals out of savagery and into the comforts of an English drawing-room, and if that is not kindness, I should like to be told what is. They want for nothing. The monkey, I am certain, is devoted to me, for he screams most piteously whenever I leave the room.

Source B — from "The Empty Cage", an article by Daniel Okwuosa-Frith, 2023.

There is a photograph I cannot forget: a single chimpanzee in a concrete enclosure, knuckles to the glass, watching a child on the other side mimic him for a laugh. We have built better cages since the Victorians — larger, greener, with enrichment toys and veterinary plans — but they are cages still, and the animal inside them did not choose the bargain. We tell ourselves a comfortable story: that the creature is safe, and fed, and would not survive in the wild. Some of that is even true. But safety is not the same as a life, and a full belly is not consent. The monkey that screams when its keeper leaves the room is not, as the Victorians fondly believed, expressing love; it is, the science now tells us plainly, expressing distress. We mistook a cry for help as a compliment. The kindest thing we have learned in a century is a hard one: that wanting to keep a wild thing close, and calling that love, is very often the most selfish wish of all.

For this question, you need to refer to the whole of Source A together with Source B. Compare how the two writers convey their different attitudes towards keeping wild animals. In your answer, you could: compare their different attitudes; compare the methods they use to convey those attitudes; support your response with references to both texts. (16 marks)