AQA GCSE English Language: Paper 2 Q1–Q2: Synthesis & Summary

Source A — from "Why I Gave Up My Car", an article by Priya Nandakumar, Greenline Monthly, 2021.

For eleven years I drove the same four miles to work, alone, twice a day. The car was a small grey hatchback, and I loved it the way you love a habit rather than a thing. Then last spring the gearbox failed, the repair quote was more than the car was worth, and I made a decision that surprised everyone, including me: I would not replace it. The first week was awful. I missed two buses, arrived late and damp, and very nearly gave in. But by the second month something had shifted. I had learned the timetable, found a cycle route along the canal, and discovered that the walk to the station passed a bakery I had driven past, unseeing, for a decade. I am fitter. I am, to my own astonishment, calmer. I have saved, by my rough sums, a little over two thousand pounds in a year. I am not telling you to sell your car. I am only telling you that I sold mine, and that the sky did not fall.

Read Source A. Choose four statements below which are TRUE. (4 marks)

• A. The writer drove a long distance to work each day.
• B. The writer drove the same route for eleven years.
• C. The writer's car broke down because of an accident.
• D. The repair would have cost more than the car was worth.
• E. The writer decided immediately that she enjoyed not having a car.
• F. The writer found a cycle route along a canal.
• G. The writer says she has saved more than two thousand pounds in a year.
• H. The writer urges all readers to sell their cars.

Source A — from "A Night on the Ward", a memoir by Desmond Achebe-Hart, published 2018.

I had volunteered at the hospital radio station for six months before they let me near the microphone, and by then I had begun to think of the building at night as a country with its own laws. The corridors emptied. The lifts ran more slowly, or seemed to. A cleaner called Margit polished the same stretch of floor every evening until it threw back the strip lights like still water, and she sang very quietly in a language I never identified. The patients who could not sleep would ring the station and ask, almost shyly, for a particular song — usually something from when they were young, usually something I had never heard of. I learned more about the twentieth century from those requests than from any class I ever sat. At three in the morning the place did not feel sad, exactly. It felt enormous, and tender, and entirely awake.

Read Source A. Choose four statements below which are TRUE. (4 marks)

• A. The writer worked at the hospital radio station for six months before speaking on air.
• B. The writer found the hospital frightening at night.
• C. A cleaner named Margit sang quietly in a language the writer never identified.
• D. Patients rang the station to complain about the music.
• E. Patients often requested songs from when they were young.
• F. The writer says he learned a great deal about the twentieth century from the requests.
• G. The writer describes the hospital at night as mainly sad.
• H. The lifts seemed to run more slowly at night.

Source A — from a letter sent home by Eliza Marchmont, a governess, dated 1869.

My dear sister — you ask how I find the schoolroom, and I shall tell you plainly. I have charge of three children, and the eldest, Master Edward, is nine and already persuaded that a governess is a kind of servant who may be argued with. We begin at seven with scripture, and there is no fire lit until eight, so that my fingers are too stiff to mend a pen. The mistress of the house inspects the children's copybooks each Friday and, if she is displeased, it is I who am spoken to, never they. I have no afternoon to myself but one, and on that one I am too tired to do anything but sleep. I do not complain of the children, who are only what they have been made; I complain, if I complain at all, of a position that asks everything and grants nothing, not even a name of my own at the dinner table, where I am addressed simply as "Miss".

Source B — from "Marking at Midnight", a blog post by Tom Riasanovsky, a secondary teacher, 2022.

People imagine teaching is the lesson — the standing up, the talking, the chalk. It isn't, mostly. The lesson is the easy bit, the bit you trained for. The hard bit is everything around it. Tonight I have ninety-one books to mark before tomorrow, each one needing a comment that is honest but kind, and I will not finish them, and I will pretend tomorrow that I did. I love the actual children fiercely; it is the system around them that grinds you down — the data drops, the emails that arrive at half past ten, the meeting to plan the meeting. I am, on paper, well paid and well respected. I have a contract, a union, a door I can close. What I do not have is an evening. I keep teaching because of the fourteen-year-old who, this afternoon, finally understood the apostrophe and looked up at me as though a window had opened. For that, I will mark until midnight. But ask me at midnight, and I might give you a different answer.

Use details from both sources. Write a summary of the differences between the two writers' experiences of working in education. (8 marks)

Source A — from "A Day at the Seaside", a newspaper sketch by H. L. Pettigrew, 1898.

We went down to the coast by the early excursion train, third class, a whole street of us packed in with our baskets and our best hats. The fun, you understand, was as much in the going as the being there. The beach itself was a fearsome crush. One bathed, if one bathed at all, from a wooden machine drawn into the water by a patient horse, and a stout woman called the dipper plunged you under whether you wished it or not. There were donkeys, and a man with a telescope who charged a penny to look at nothing, and a band that played the same three tunes until dusk. We ate shrimps from paper cones and brown bread thick with salt butter. By six the sun and the salt had done their work and the whole street slept on the train home, sunburnt and sticky and entirely satisfied, having spent, in all, perhaps two shillings each.

Source B — from "Why We Still Go to the Beach", an article by Nadia Forsythe, 2023.

My daughter is seven and has been to three countries, but her favourite place on earth is a stretch of grey English coast forty minutes from our flat. We go on the train, which is now the cheapest part of the day; everything else has a price tag and a queue. The arcade swallows pound coins like a hungry animal. A single ice cream costs what a whole family's lunch once might have. And yet. She does not care about any of this. She wants the same things children have always wanted: to dig a hole that fills mysteriously with water, to be chased by a wave and shriek, to bury my feet and call it a sandcastle. We take our own sandwiches now, not from thrift exactly but as a small act of resistance. By evening she is salt-crusted and asleep against the train window, and I think: some pleasures refuse to be sold, however hard the seafront tries.

Use details from both sources. Write a summary of the differences between the two writers' days at the seaside. (8 marks)

Source A — from "The Long Way North", a travel account by Constance Petrov-Reilly, 1924.

We had been warned that the coach road beyond the pass was no road at all, and the warning was kind. For two days the wheels found every rut that frost and thaw had carved, and we were thrown about inside like dried peas in a tin. At the inns there was black bread, a soup whose origins I did not enquire into, and beds that one shared, willingly or not, with companions of the insect kind. I will not pretend I was comfortable; I was filthy, bruised and frequently afraid. And yet I would not exchange that fortnight for a year of any drawing-room. Every cold dawn brought a country no Englishwoman of my acquaintance had ever seen, and I wrote until my ink froze, certain that I was the most fortunate creature alive.

Source B — from "I Travelled the Same Route, a Century Later", an article by Joel Mwangi-Stein, 2024.

I had read Petrov-Reilly's account as a teenager and never quite got over it, so when a cheap flight and a fortnight's leave aligned, I went to trace her "long way north". It is, of course, a different planet now. The pass she crossed in two punishing days is a ninety-minute drive on smooth tarmac, past a service station selling the same crisps I buy at home. I slept in a clean hotel with reliable hot water and a buffet breakfast, and I was, by any reasonable measure, perfectly comfortable. What I was not, if I am honest, was transformed. I had her book on my phone and kept checking my photographs against her sentences, and her frozen ink kept winning. I had come a very long way in great ease, and I could not shake the feeling that the ease was exactly what I had paid, somehow, to lose.

Use details from both sources. Write a summary of the differences between the two writers' journeys. (8 marks)