IGCSE Core Paper - Question 2: An exam question a week

Question 2 is about taking information from a source article and using it to create an imagined piece of your own. This question is worth 20 marks and you should spend about 45-50 minutes on it.

The question tests the reading objectives of:

• Understand and collate explicit meanings (Understand the literal ideas of the text)
• Understand, explain and collate implicit meanings and attitudes (Make inferences)
• Select, analyse and evaluate what is relevant to specific purposes (Find the best information to meet the question requirements)

These are worth 10 marks!

Your last 10 marks tests the writing objectives of:

Articulate what is thought, felt and imagined.

Order and present facts, ideas and opinions.

Understand and use a range of appropriate vocabulary

Use language and register appropriate to audience and context.

Make accurate and effective use of paragraphs, grammatical structures, sentences, punctuation and spelling.

This tests all the elements of your writing MOT.

To complete this question fully you will need to skim read the article first to get an idea of the main information in the text.

Then you will have to scan find key information you will need to meet the parts of the question (You will always be given prompts of things you need to mention).

You will gain the most marks by:

Making inferences about the text / content / thoughts and feelings of someone rather than just stating what was in the text.

Imagine you are the parents of Jill Stark and you have been interviewed about your alcohol consumption. Write the words of the interview with the reporter. You should answer the following questions: ·         What kind of experiences have you had with alcohol? ·         Why have you decided to give up alcohol for a year? Base the report on what you have read in Passage A and be careful to use your own words. Up to ten marks will be available for the content of your answer, and up to ten marks for the quality of your writing.

An Extract from 'High Sobriety: My Year Without Booze' by Jill Stark, originally published in The Independent available here

The roar in my skull sounds like waves battering a shore. My head, planted facedown in a sticky pillow, feels as heavy as a waterlogged sandbag. My body is a dance floor for pain. Welcome to 2011, Starkers: a new year, a new start; same old stinking hangover.

Last night was huge. Dawn had broken by the time I staggered home. I remember cursing the light and the chirpy birds. It was, like so many before it, a party that had got away from me. It had been a ridiculously hot Melbourne New Year’s Eve: dry and oppressive, with a blasting northerly wind. I felt as if I was trapped inside a fan-forced oven. As I sipped my first drink – a stubby of beer – with friends in their backyard paddling pool, the mercury crept past 40 degrees. It was 6pm.

As the night wore on, there was champagne with strawberries, more beer, more champagne, and then even more beer. There were sparklers, dancing, and high-pitched phone calls to Scotland, where it was still the last day of the decade before. I vaguely remember a fiercely contested drawing competition with crayons, and, for reasons I can’t fathom, sitting atop a stepladder with a miner’s lamp strapped to my head.

Later, at another friend’s house, we had White Russians in tumblers, and tequila in martini glasses. I remember one of my friends vomiting in the kitchen sink, and the group blithely singing over it as if this was neither noteworthy nor unusual. I remember thinking, when’s this going to stop? Then having another beer for the road.

I roll over on to my side, releasing a deathbed groan. The alarm clock comes into view, its illuminated digits stabbing my eyes. It’s 2pm. Another groan; this one seems to come from my bones. My guts churn as a tribe of African drummers pounds out a rhythm in my brain, and I pay a grudging respect to a hangover that, having been almost a month in the making, has arrived with some fanfare.