AQA GCSE English Language: Paper 2 Q3: Language Analysis

Source A — from "Three Days in the Mud", a review of the Wadebrook Music Festival by Carla Stennett-Ojo, 2019.

Let me be the friend who tells you the truth your photographs will not. The Wadebrook Festival was not a celebration; it was a slow-motion disaster with a wristband. We arrived to a car park that was, in fact, a bog, and were waved into it by a steward whose expression suggested he already knew. The campsite had been pitched, with breathtaking optimism, on a flood plain. By Saturday the main stage was an island, the toilets were a rumour, and a single overworked burger van had become the spiritual centre of a community of the damp and the betrayed. The organisers, when they spoke at all, spoke of "an enhanced weather experience". We paid one hundred and forty pounds for the privilege of watching our tents dissolve. The headline act, mercifully, was excellent — for the eleven minutes before the power failed. I have been to funerals with more joy in them. Save your money, save your shoes, and stay at home, where the rain, at least, stays outside.

You now need to refer only to Source A. How does the writer use language to persuade readers that the festival was a disaster? (12 marks)

Source B — from "Dawn on the Salt Flats", a piece of travel writing by Idris Calloway-Mbeki, 2020.

There is a moment, just before the sun, when the salt flat stops being a place and becomes a mirror. I had risen at four, walked out past the last of the jeeps, and stood where the white crust met the thin film of last night's rain. And then the light came. Not gradually — all at once, as though someone had thrown a switch behind the world. The flooded crust took the whole sky and laid it at my feet, so that I stood, absurdly, on the clouds. There was no horizon. There was no up or down. A bird crossed, and its reflection crossed to meet it, and for a heartbeat the two birds touched and became one. I am not, by temperament, a man given to wonder; I distrust it, professionally and personally. But out there, ankle-deep in the reflected dawn, I felt the small machinery of my cynicism quietly stop. The silence was not empty. It was the loudest thing I have ever heard. When at last I turned to go, my own footprints were already filling with sky.

You now need to refer only to Source B. How does the writer use language to convey the wonder of the landscape at dawn? (12 marks)

Source A — from an open letter to the town council by Margaret Oyelaran-Booth, published in the Fenwick Gazette, 2022.

Councillors, I am writing about the last green field in our town, and I am writing while there is still time. You know the one. It sits behind the old library, and on any fine evening it holds half of Fenwick — the dog-walkers, the toddlers learning to fall over, the teenagers pretending they are too cool to be there, the old men who come simply to watch the light go. You propose to sell it for forty-two houses and a "landscaped amenity zone", which I understand to mean three benches and a bin. I have read your report. It speaks of "deliverable units" and "yield". It does not once use the word grass. Let me translate your report into English: you intend to concrete over the one place in this town that belongs to everybody, and to call the loss a gain. I am not naive. I know the town needs homes. But a field, once built on, does not grow back, and a community that sells its last shared green has sold something it cannot itemise and will not get a receipt for. Think again. Please. While there is still a field to think about.

You now need to refer only to Source A. How does the writer use language to persuade the councillors not to sell the field? (12 marks)

Source B — from "The Last Shift", a memoir by Frank Delahunty-Rao about closing the steelworks, 2017.

On the final morning we clocked in out of habit, though there was nothing left to make. The furnace, which had not been cold in forty years, was cold. You have to understand what that meant to us. That furnace had a sound, a deep continuous breathing you stopped hearing the way you stop hearing your own heart, and its absence was the first thing that woke me that morning — not a noise, but a silence where a noise should be. We walked the floor one last time. Big Sully, who had never in my memory said a soft word, laid his hand flat on the cooling iron as you might on the flank of a dying animal, and left it there, and none of us spoke. They gave us each a letter and a carriage clock. A clock. For men whose whole lives had been measured by that furnace, they gave us a machine for counting the hours we would now have nothing to fill. I have not been able to look at it since. It sits in a drawer, ticking, doing to my evenings what we once did to the iron.

You now need to refer only to Source B. How does the writer use language to convey the sense of loss felt by the workers? (12 marks)

Source A — from "Put the Phone Down", a comment piece by Naomi Achterberg-Syal, 2023.

I gave a talk last week to two hundred people, and two hundred phones gave it right back to me. A sea of little glowing rectangles, each one held up like a shield, each one busily recording a moment its owner had stopped actually having. We have become a species that no longer attends its own life; we curate it instead. We do not watch the sunset — we photograph it, badly, and move on, reassured that it is filed. We do not meet our friends — we sit beside them and scroll, two solitudes sharing a table. The phone promised to connect us, and in a narrow sense it kept its word: I have never been more reachable, and never less reached. Here is the cruel arithmetic of the thing. Every hour you spend documenting your life is an hour you are not living it. The camera roll fills; the memory empties. So put it down — not forever, I am not a monster — but for one ordinary evening. Watch the light go without reaching for anything. You will be astonished by how much is happening when nobody is filming.

You now need to refer only to Source A. How does the writer use language to persuade readers to use their phones less? (12 marks)