Edexcel GCSE English Language: Paper 1 Q3: Language & Structure

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Esther Loame, titled The Quiet House. A woman named Nadia comes home to her empty flat after dark.

The corridor outside her door was, as always, perfectly silent, and Nadia turned her key and stepped inside and felt, at once, that something was wrong. She could not have said what. The hall was as she had left it: the coats on their hooks, the umbrella in its stand, the narrow strip of carpet running away into the dark of the flat. She stood very still and listened. Nothing. Only the fridge, far off in the kitchen, breathing its low electric hum. She told herself she was tired, that she imagined things when she was tired, and she reached for the light switch on the wall.

It did not work.

She clicked it again. Up, down. Up, down. The darkness did not lift. And now the small ordinary noises of the flat — the hum of the fridge, the tick of the hall clock, the distant grumble of traffic — seemed to draw back and hold their breath, leaving a silence so complete that she could hear the blood moving in her own ears. From somewhere deep inside the flat, from a room she was certain she had left empty, came the soft, unmistakable sound of a single floorboard taking a man's weight.

Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to create a sense of unease. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (6 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Caleb Thorne, titled First Light. A girl named Sade watches the sun rise over the sea on the morning of her birthday.

For a long time there was nothing but grey. Grey sky, grey water, the two of them meeting at a horizon Sade could barely find, and the whole world holding its breath in the half-dark before the dawn. The cold came in off the sea and pressed against her cheeks. She waited. She had waited, she thought, her whole life for something, though she could not have said exactly what.

Then, far out where the water met the sky, a thin line of gold appeared.

It spread. The gold seeped along the horizon and lifted, and the sea, which had been dull and lead-coloured, suddenly caught fire, every small wave tipped with light, a thousand bright coins flung down and rolling towards the shore. The clouds turned from grey to rose to a blazing, impossible orange. Warmth touched her face for the first time, gentle as a hand. And Sade, who had come down to the beach feeling small and uncertain and alone, felt something inside her chest lift and open with the light, as though the morning had been arranged, after all, entirely for her.

Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to create a sense of hope and renewal. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (6 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Rosamund Pyke, titled The Climb. A teenager named Daniel is part-way up a steep cliff path when the ground gives way.

Daniel had climbed this path a dozen times. He knew its turns, its loose stones, the place where the gorse snagged your sleeve. He was thinking about none of it. He was thinking about lunch, about the cold lemonade in his bag, about nothing at all, his feet moving on the familiar rock without his mind. The sea was a long way below, glittering, harmless.

Then the world tilted.

The ledge beneath his right foot — solid, certain, the same as it had always been — simply was not there. It fell away, a slab of it sliding off into the air with a sound like a dropped plate, and Daniel went with it. For one endless, weightless second there was nothing under him at all, only the bright bowl of the sea swinging up to meet him and the wind suddenly loud in his ears. His hand shot out. It found, by luck rather than thought, a fist of cold root growing from a crack, and it closed. The jolt nearly tore his arm from its socket. And then he was hanging, both feet kicking at empty air, the whole weight of his body swinging from four fingers and a knot of heather, and the harmless glittering sea was very, very far below, and waiting.

Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to create tension and danger. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (6 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Imogen Vale, titled The Lost Dog. A boy named Theo searches for his dog after a storm.

All morning Theo had searched, and the day had given him nothing. He had called until his throat was raw, the dog's name thrown out into the dripping woods and swallowed without answer. He had walked the lane, the field, the wet black margin of the river, and there had been only mud, and silence, and the slow drip of the soaked trees. By midday he had stopped believing he would find her. He sat down on a wet stump and put his head in his hands and let the cold soak through him, and he thought, dully, that this was simply how it was now: she was gone, and the world was a colder and emptier place, and there was nothing to be done.

And then he heard it.

So small at first that he was not sure it was real — a thin, broken whimper, somewhere off to his left, beyond the brambles. He lifted his head. It came again, weak and frightened and unmistakably hers, and Theo was up and running before he had decided to move, crashing through the thorns that tore at his arms, not feeling them, calling her name in a voice cracked wide open with hope, towards the small grey shape that struggled in the ditch and lifted, at the sound of him, one muddy, joyful ear.

Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to take the reader from despair to hope. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (6 marks)

This extract is from a story by the (fictional) writer Lucian Frost, titled The Inheritance. A woman named Margaret meets her estranged sister for the first time in twenty years.

Margaret saw her the moment she came through the café door, and the twenty years fell away, and did not. Here was the same face — older, lined, the dark hair gone to grey — and yet underneath it, like a photograph held up to a brighter one, was the girl who had shared her bedroom, her secrets, the long childhood arguments that had ended, finally, in this: silence, and an ocean, and two decades of birthdays unmarked.

Neither of them moved at first.

Then her sister smiled, a small, uncertain, hopeful smile, and lifted one hand in a little wave, the way she always had, and something in Margaret that had been clenched tight for twenty years loosened, just slightly, just enough. She crossed the room. They did not embrace; that would have been too much, too soon. They simply sat, on opposite sides of a small round table, two grey-haired women in a noisy café, and looked at one another, while around them the world clattered cups and laughed and paid no attention at all to the fact that, after so long, after everything, the two of them had finally come home to the same room.

Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to convey the emotion of the reunion. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (6 marks)