Contents Introduction


Step 1: Identify key information (use a highlighter or underline) Example



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Step 1: Identify key information (use a highlighter or underline)


Example





Imagery:
Having invented the modern city, 19th century Britain promptly reeled back in horror at what it had done. To the Victorians exploring the cholera-ridden back alleys of London’s East End, the city was a hideous tumour sucking the life out of the countryside and creating in its place a vast polluted landscape of squalor, disease and crime. In their eyes, the city was a place to be feared, controlled and, if possible, eliminated.
Q: Show how the writer’s use of imagery to convey the Victorians’ disgust at the city they had created. (4)




Step 3: where appropriate acknowledge literal roots or any word associations



Possible answers:


Step 2: quote

1 “sucking the life out of” the comparison here is with a bloodsucking creature (or even a vampire). Here, it is used to suggest the Victorians felt that London was essentially parasitic, feeding off and likely to damage or destroy the countryside, while having no positive value of its own




Step 4: explain how it is used / why it is effective

1. “reeled back” “to reel” is to stagger, sway or recoil, from the impact of a blow or in shock or disbelief. This suggests a deep-seated, almost physical revulsion, a desire to step back from what they found, a sense of them losing control and being shaken to their very foundations
2. “(hideous) tumour” a tumour is literally a growth or a mass of diseased cells which can lead to serious illness or death. Used here, it suggests the Victorians felt that London was unhealthy, malignant, evil, increasingly invasive, destructive to the country as a whole

Extract 1: (from an article about physical and online libraries)
I have spent a substantial portion of my life since in libraries, and I still enter them with a mixture of excitement and awe. I am not alone in this. Veneration for libraries is as old as writing itself, for a library is more to our culture than a collection of books: it is a temple, a symbol of power, the hushed core of civilisation, the citadel of memory, with its own mystique, social and sensual as well as intellectual.
Q: By referring to one example, show how the writer’s imagery in the above lines conveys the importance of libraries. (2)






Extract 2: (from an article about footballer George Best)
A PERFECT, FATAL GLAMOUR
Everything about Best at the height of his powers carried the whiff of the perfect, fatal glamour of the kind that is destined to evaporate. Best’s style of play was edgy, exciting and apparently effortless; such a patent excess of talent made a mockery of hard gift. So did his black-haired, blue-eyed, fine-featured beauty, which seemed almost exotically alien in a nation filled with pasty faces and bad teeth; in photographs from the 1960s, the saturnine, nonchalant Best sums up the ideal of the decade.
And yet, for all his difference, he was somehow one of us: Northern Irish, working class, troubled, “Our George”. The Belfast boy. Inimitable, definably Northern Irish, form his youthful shyness to his chancer’s cheek.
Personality has a way of leaking into performance, and the performers who dazzle audiences the most are those who trail the powerful musk of risk in their wake; they fill the gawping spectator with the intoxicating sensation that anything could and might happen. Yet that same musk has a nasty way of turning to poison-gas at home, setting small children weeping and spouses running for the door.
Q: Discuss to what extent the writer effectively develops the imagery of “whiff”. (4)





Extract 3:
In this passage the philosopher A. C. Grayling urges us to look to philosophy to cure the stresses of modern life.
UNHAPPY? TURN TO PLATO, NOT PROZAC
Some turn to traditional solutions of drugs (mainly in the form of alcohol or Prozac) or religion, both of which erect a safety barrier against discontent, although by different means: the former by obliterating consciousness of the vacuum, the latter by supplying a ready-made filling. Others turn to the many kinds of psychotherapy on offer, from Freudian psychoanalysis to behavioural therapy; or they seek relief in astrology, feng shui, aromatherapy or tarot cards.
All these efforts have something in common: they are based on the belief that the problem of life’s meaning can be solved by one or another of a nostrum from the new-age shop or a doctor’s surgery, a counsellor or a pub, a church or a séance. By handing over either their money or their credulity at one of these places, they hope they will be relieved of the emptiness within.
But another thing these efforts have in common is how often they fail. They might seem to work for a time but, like most mere coverings, they become worn or frayed and the shape of the original problem starts to show through.
Q: Explain how the imagery of the last paragraph, conveys the unsatisfactory nature of “these efforts”. (4)






Extract 4: (from an article about social change by Christopher Booker)
At the same time, in large part generated by this sense that we had all climbed onto an escalator moving ever more rapidly up into the future, sweeping away so many of the traditional landmarks and patterns of life, a new spirit emerged in Western society – a spirit of revolt against the “restrictive” conventions of the past, and in favour of a new “liberated” vision of the future. Nowhere did this show itself more obviously that in the remarkable new importance which in the late Fifties came to be attached to youth – manifesting itself in the emergence of a whole new, rebellious “youth culture”, in Teddy Boys and the rock’ n ’roll craze which swept the West in 1956-58, and in Britain’s “Angry Young Men”, the playwrights and novelists who shot to prominence at the same time.
Q: Explain how the writer uses imagery to clarify his description of how Britain was changing. (4)




Extract 5:
In this passage Christopher Booker discusses aspects of social change in Britain and the USA from the 1950s through the 1960s and into the beginning of the 1970s.
I am inclined to see the shape of British post-war history as having been not unlike that of a gigantic tidal wave. It was a wave which began to gather in the mid-Fifties, as the world finally began to emerge from the shadows of the Second World War – a wave of expectation, of nervous excitement, born of the growing sense that somehow Britain, the West and mankind were moving forward into a new era, of a kind never known before.
This sense of anticipation was above all generated in the mid-Fifties by the dawning realisation that, thanks to the miraculous advances of technology, an entirely new kind of material prosperity was coming into being. Hundreds of millions of people, for the first time in their lives, were able to own cars, buy fridges and washing machines, shop at supermarkets for detergents and frozen foods. Television passed into the centre of homes and our lives. There was suddenly much more money around than would have seemed imaginable to any previous generation, and every year that passed seemed to bring yet more technical marvels, more change – transistor radios, jet airliners, computers, motorways, new kinds of architecture in steel, concrete and glass.
Q: How effective does the image of a “wave” help the writer to convey the feelings of optimism and enthusiasm that characterised this period. (2)



Extract 6: (from an article about the changing nature of celebrity)
But then the look of fame shifted again, turning full face into the twentieth century. Journalist William Allen White wrote in his autobiography that “That decade which climaxed in 1912 was a time of tremendous change in our national life…The American people were melting down old heroes and recasting the mould in which heroes were made.” It was more that recasting old metal: new alloys were created that entirely reconfigured the heroic mould.
Q: How effective do you find the imagery in the above paragraph in clarifying the changing nature of celebrity? (4)





Extract 7: (from an article about the boxer Mohamed Ali)
I was no good at wood-working and like, so I saved my paper route money, and simply bought a baseball bat, a genuine Louisville Slugger, the first one I ever owned. I sanded that bat, re-stained it dark, gave it a name. I carved, scratched really, into the bat the word, Ali. I tried to carve a lightning bolt but my limited artistic skill would not permit it. I wanted to carry it in a case but I didn’t have one. I just slung it over my shoulder like the great weapon it was, my knight’s sword. And I felt like some magnificent knight, some great protector of honour and virtue, whenever I walked on the field.

I used the bat the entire summer and a magical season it was. I was the best hitter in the neighbourhood. Once, I won a game in the last at-bat with a home run, and the boys just crowded round me as if I were a spectacle to behold, as if I were, for some small moment, in this insignificant part of the world, playing this meaningless game, their majestic, golden prince.


Q: Comment on the writer’s use of imagery towards the end of paragraph 1 and in paragraph 2, to convey how the bat affected the way he thought about himself. You should refer to two examples in your answer. (4)




Extract 8: (from an extract about pollution caused by aircraft)
But even in this self-interested arena a representative from the US Federal Aviation Administration caused some sharp intakes of breath from the audience by showing an extraordinary map of current flight-paths etched over one another on the world’s surface. The only places on Earth that are not scarred by routes are blocks of air space over the central Pacific, the southern Atlantic and Antarctica.
Q: How effective do you find the writer’s use of imagery in lines in conveying the impact that flying has on the environment? (2)




Questions on the effectiveness of Language - Sentence Structure
These types of questions are designed to test your understanding of how sentences are put together, and how writers use sentence construction to develop and enhance their ideas and line of thought. As well as understanding the different uses of punctuation (e.g. the colon, semi-colon, question mark, and so on), you will need to learn about some of the following:



Sentence type and length

Balance, antithesis and climax,

Repetition of word patterns

parenthesis

Parallelism of structure





Sample Questions
Identify two aspects of sentence structure and explain…….

Comment on effectiveness of the writer’s sentence structure in promoting his argument about…………

Explain how the sentence structure is used to……
Formula


  1. Identify/highlight an important aspect of sentence structure

  2. Explain how it works/comment on the effect it has







You should become familiar with the techniques outlined in the grid below.
Sentence Structure Guide


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