Contents Introduction

Speaker after speaker bemoaned how the public had somehow misunderstood the aviation industry and had come to believe that aviation is a huge and disproportionate polluter. Let’s get this in perspective, said repeated speakers: this is small fry compared with cars, factories, even homes. Why are we being singled out, they cried? Why not, they said, chase after other industries that could easily make efficiency savings instead of picking on an industry that gives so much to the world, yet is currently so economically fragile?

When I was a child growing up in the late 1959s, every self-respecting infant in our neck of the woods possessed both a teddy bear and a golliwog. The origins of both toys, and of their names, were largely obscure to us. Teddy was said to have something to do with the portly figure of King Edward V11, and golly – well, there were no black children round our way, so I suppose we just thought of him as an imaginary figure, like those strange-looking characters from Disney cartoons who inhabit the toy counters today.

But that was then, and this is now. Back then, black people were still being systematically denied access to housing and employment in this country purely on the grounds of their colour. Back then, as President Barack Obama pointed out at his inaugural address, his own father would have struggled to be served in many restaurants and diners in Washington. Back then, we were at the tail-end of a whole aeon of history – at least 2,000 years – in which white people of European origin, with their economic and political systems, had come to dominate the entire globe and had come to believe, by and large, that they did so because of their natural superiority to other races.

Q: Explain how the writer’s sentence structure in paragraph 2 adds impact to her argument. (2)




Extract 10 (from article by Janet Daily abut limiting air travel to protect the environment)

Is your journey really necessary? Who would have thought that, in the absence of world war and in the midst of unprecedented prosperity, politicians would be telling us not to travel? Just as working people have begun to enjoy the freedoms that the better-off have known for generations—the experience of other cultures, other cuisines, other climates—they are threatened with having those liberating possibilities priced out of their reach.

And when I hear politicians—most of them comfortably off—trying to deny enlightenment and pleasure to “working class” people, I reach for my megaphone. Maybe Tommy Tattoo and his mates do use cheap flights to the sunshine as an extension of their binge-drinking opportunities, but for thousands of people whose parents would never have ventured beyond Blackpool or Rothesay, air travel has been a social revelation.

So, before we all give the eco-lobby’s anti-flying agenda the unconditional benefit of the doubt, can we just review their strategy as a whole?

Defiant Serious Critical Sentimental

Nostalgic Enthusiastic Detached Pleading

Solemn Bitter Ironic Accusatory

Whimsical Irate Cheerful Playful

Objective Compassionate Formal Impassioned

Awed Pessimistic Optimistic Neutral

Cynical Negative Positive Scathing

Threatening Biased Mischievous Tolerant

Emotive Argumentative Persuasive Polite

1. 
   State the tone – tongue-in-cheek, anger, disillusionment, irony……
   
2. 
   Identify the technique used – sentence structure, word choice……
   
3. 
   Quote (if appropriate) the word or phrase you are going to focus on.
   
4. 
   Explain how it contributes to tone.
   

I am fed up listening to scaremongers talking about the E-coli virus, telling me my child should never visit a farm or come into contact with animals. I am very weary of organisations that are dedicated to promulgating the idea that threats and dangers to children lurk everywhere. I am sick of charities who on the one have attack overprotective parents and at the same time say children should never be left unsupervised in public places.

There was a shot of an old farmer. He was as sinewy as a Balinese carving. He stands, unsmiling holding on to some willowy branches, as if he has indeed been hewn from the tree. “Don’t you mind taking pictures of people?” asked a friend. I thought it a strange question. There was a perfect picture opportunity and I made the most of it. I didn’t speak Indonesian and I had to physically position him for my desired pose. He didn’t seem to mind. I got my photograph and perhaps he felt flattered. I said thank you.