Edexcel GCSE English Language: Paper 2 Q3: Language & Structure

This extract is from a (fictional) travel article, The Market Before Dawn, by Carla Imany, published in an invented magazine in 2017. The writer describes a city market waking up.

At four in the morning the market is a held breath. The stalls stand empty and skeletal, bare frames against a sky the colour of wet slate, and the only sound is a single tap dripping somewhere into a drain. You could believe nothing was going to happen here at all.

Then the first van arrives. Its headlights swing across the square like a searchlight, and behind it comes another, and another, until the whole place is loud with engines and shouting and the clatter of shutters going up. Crates of fish slide onto the stone, silver and astonishing. Sacks of oranges split their seams. A man carries a tower of empty boxes so tall it walks by itself, with two legs underneath. Somewhere a radio begins, then loses, then finds again a tune.

By six the market is no longer waking; it is fully, ferociously awake. The aisles are rivers. Voices rise into a single roar that is not quite words. And I stand in the middle of it, jostled and happy and entirely forgotten, and think that this — this ordinary, daily, miraculous thing — is the truest portrait of a city you will ever be allowed to see. Not its monuments. Its mornings.

Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to bring the market vividly to life. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (15 marks)

This extract is from a (fictional) memoir, The House at the End of the Lane, by Tomas Veitch, published by an invented press in 2012. The writer returns to a childhood home now derelict.

I had told myself I would feel nothing. I was wrong about that, as I have been wrong about most things concerning that house.

The gate gave at the second push, the way it always did, and there was the garden — or what the garden had become. The lawn my father had measured with a ruler was a meadow now, waist-high and seeding, and the apple tree we had not been allowed to climb had finally fallen and was busy turning back into soil. I stood for a while and let the wrongness of it settle over me.

Inside was worse, and also, strangely, better. The wallpaper hung down in long tongues. There was a bird's nest in the light fitting and the smell of damp and absence everywhere. But on the kitchen doorframe, faint under the green, I found the pencil marks: a ladder of dates and heights, my whole childhood measured in inches. I put my thumb against the highest of them. I had thought myself so grown, that summer. The mark came up to my chest.

That is the cruelty of an empty house. It does not forget you. It simply goes on without you, growing wild and patient and indifferent, keeping your small marks on its walls long after you have stopped being the child who made them.

Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to convey the emotion of returning to the house. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (15 marks)

This extract is from a (fictional) nineteenth-century-style account, A Night Among the Looms, attributed to an invented writer, Josiah Penhale, dated 1871. The writer describes a visit to a textile mill at night.

I had been told the mill never slept, and I did not believe it until I stood within its doors.

Conceive, if you can, a single vast room longer than a church, lit a sickly yellow by the gas, in which six hundred looms thunder at once. The noise is not a sound but a weather: it enters at the chest and stays there, so that a man's own heartbeat is lost in it. I shouted to my guide and could not hear my own voice. He smiled, and pointed, for here speech is a useless coin.

Among this iron storm move the children. They are small and quick and dreadfully calm, darting beneath the moving parts to mend a broken thread, their fingers faster than my eye. One girl, perhaps nine years old, worked within an inch of teeth that would not have paused to take her hand. She did not look afraid. That, I think, was the most frightening thing of all: that terror, practised daily from the age of six, at last wears smooth, and becomes merely Tuesday.

I came out at dawn into a silence so complete it rang. Behind me the great machine laboured on, indifferent, and would labour so when the girl was grown, and old, and gone, and another child stood where she had stood.

Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to make the mill disturbing. Support your views with detailed reference to the text. (15 marks)