Edexcel GCSE English Language: Paper 2 Q6: Evaluation

This extract is from a (fictional) opinion column, Bring Back the Bus, by Nadia Okereke, published in an invented newspaper in 2022. The writer argues that her town's new bus scheme has been a success.

They told us the new electric buses would be empty, expensive, and gone within a year. I have a confession to make: I told them that too. I was wrong, and I have rarely been so glad to be.

Walk to the stop on Cradock Street at half past eight and you will not find empty seats; you will find a queue. Pensioners who had not left their streets in months now do the week's shopping in town. Teenagers who used to beg lifts now travel alone, proud as captains. Last Tuesday I watched a man in a wheelchair board without fuss, without a ramp wrestled into place, without the small daily humiliation our old buses dealt out like change. He simply rolled on, and the doors closed, and we went.

Yes, it cost money. Of course it cost money — good things do. But set that figure beside the things it bought, and tell me honestly which column is heavier. A high street that breathes again. Three new cafes where there were boarded windows. Eight hundred fewer cars on the ring road every morning, and air, on a clear day, you can almost taste the cleanness of.

The cynics will say I have gone soft. Let them. I would rather be soft and right than hard and wrong. The buses came, the town climbed aboard, and the only people still standing at the kerb, arms folded, are the ones who said it could not be done.

In this extract, the writer attempts to persuade readers that the new bus scheme has been a triumph. Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (15 marks)

This extract is from a (fictional) nineteenth-century-style account, The Opening of the New Pier, attributed to an invented writer, Augustus Frayle, dated 1884. The writer reports on a seaside town's grand new attraction.

It is my pleasing duty to record that the town has, this week, acquired a Pier; and I use the capital letter advisedly, for nothing so small as a lower-case pier could account for the rejoicing I witnessed.

Consider the scene. Eleven thousand souls, by the constable's count, pressed upon the promenade. Bands played at either end and, regrettably, different tunes. Flags of every nation snapped overhead, including several of nations I am tolerably certain do not exist. The Mayor, a gentleman of generous circumference, declared the structure "a jewel set in the very crown of the coast", and then, overcome either by emotion or by luncheon, was obliged to sit down.

I confess I was moved. Out it strode upon its iron legs, four hundred yards into a sea that has drowned better things than piers, and at its end a pavilion of glass blazed in the afternoon sun like a lantern lit for the whole Channel to see. Children who had never in their lives stood over deep water now ran shrieking with delight above it. An old fisherman beside me, who had buried two sons to that same sea, looked along the pier a long while and said only, "Well. It is something to set against it."

And that, I think, is the truest verdict of the day. Not that the Pier is grand, though it is. But that a town long bullied by the water had, for once, built something to stand out in it unafraid.

In this extract, the writer attempts to convey that the opening of the pier was a genuine triumph for the town. Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (15 marks)

This extract is from a (fictional) magazine feature, I Gave Up My Phone for a Month, by Reuben Castellano, published on an invented website in 2023. The writer describes the experiment and its results.

For thirty days I did a thing my friends called either brave or idiotic, depending on how much they liked me: I put my phone in a drawer and shut it.

The first week was the worst kind of awful. I reached for a pocket that was empty perhaps two hundred times a day, a phantom limb twitching for a hand that was no longer there. I got lost. I missed two parties because I had not seen the messages. I sat on a train with nothing to do and felt the strange, forgotten panic of being alone with my own thoughts, which turned out to be mostly about cheese.

Then something shifted. By week two the silence had stopped feeling like a punishment and started feeling like a room I had not known was in my house. I read four books. I learned the names of the people in the flat below mine, having lived above them, in silence, for two years. I noticed that the walk to work passes a tree that flowers, briefly and spectacularly, in the last week of April, and that I had never once seen it.

I will not lie to you and say I have given up my phone for good. I have not; it is back in my pocket as I type this, buzzing, demanding, useful. But I have given up the belief that I cannot live without it, and that, it turns out, was the heavier thing to carry. The drawer is still there. I know how to use it now.

In this extract, the writer attempts to show that giving up his phone changed him for the better. Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (15 marks)