We're currently looking at a core reading paper, which is worth 40% of your overall grade.
The core reading paper is broken into two question:
Question 1 focuses on your understanding and analysis of an article then Question 2 requires you to use an article to base your own writing on.
Question 1 is broken down into sub sections and we are going to deal here with sub questions i now.
Sub question i requires you to summarise the article you have read. It has the most marks for a sub question and is worth 7 of your 30 marks.
The dictionary definition of to summarise is:
To Summarise - to give a brief statement of the main points.
This means that in your own words you need to write the main parts from the article you have read which trests you on objective:
- Understand and collate explicit meanings (Understand the literal ideas of the text)
The most effective way to do this is to skim read for meaning and scan for the topic sentences of each paragraph (the sentence which tells you what the paragraph is about).
Decide which ones relate to your question.
You have seven marks so you should aim to pick out the 7 most important pieces of information.
Finally you need to write it up in your own words.
Try the one below:
i - Reread the whole passage. Write a summary of why the writer chose to give up alcohol for a year.
Write a paragraph of about 50-70 words
7 Marks
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.
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