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UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE INTERNATIONAL EXAMINATIONS
General Certificate of Education
Advanced Subsidiary Level and Advanced Level
8287/13
ENGLISH LANGUAGE (US)
Paper 1 Passages for Comment
May/June 2013
2 hours
Additional Materials:
Answer Booklet/Paper
* 9 2 5 4 9 7 1 6 9 3 *
READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST
If you have been given an Answer Booklet, follow the instructions on the front cover of the Booklet.
Write your Center number, candidate number, and name on all the work you hand in.
Write in dark blue or black pen.
Do not use staples, paper clips, highlighters, glue, or correction fluid.
Answer two questions.
You are reminded of the need for good English and clear presentation in your answers.
At the end of the examination, fasten all your work securely together.
The number of marks is given in brackets [ ] at the end of each question or part question.
This document consists of 7 printed pages and 1 blank page.
DC (CW) 73806/2
© UCLES 2013
[Turn over
2
Answer two questions.
1
The following passage is an account of the writer’s first experience of work.
(a) Comment on the style and language of the passage.
[15]
(b) The same writer later finds another kind of work and writes an account of her thoughts and
feelings. Write the opening of the account (between 120–150 words). Base your answer
closely on the style and language of the original extract.
[10]
I had experienced a rather unceremonious exit from school. I had no real idea what
I wanted to do, just some vague fantasies involving writing, a palazzo1, an adoring
Italian man, daily love letters and me in a sort of Sophia Loren 2 dress, weaving
through a Roman market holding a basket of ripe scented figs.
I had just tried to explain this to my mother over lunch at a restaurant in London. She
was not, curiously, sharing my enthusiasm.
5
‘Enough. You’re going to secretarial college to learn something useful like typing.’
‘But I need to learn about culture!’ She gave me a very beady look.
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘No more. End of conversation.’
‘But I…’ The look blackened. I resorted to the historic old faithful between teenagers 10
and their mothers.
‘God… Why don’t you understand me?’ and ran out into the still, grey street sobbing.
I threw myself on a doorstep and lit a bitter cigarette. And then something between
serendipity and Alice in Wonderland magic happened.
A black taxi chugged to a halt by the doorstep on which I sat. Out of it fell a creature 15
who surpassed my Italian imaginings.
She wore a ship on her head, a miniature galleon with proud sails that billowed in the
wind. Her white bosom swelled out of an implausibly tiny corset and she navigated
the street in neat steps, teetering on the brink of five-inch heels. Her arms were full
to bursting with hat boxes and carrier bags. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know who 20
that is but I want to be her friend.’
I was so fascinated I forgot to cry. I stood up and said, ‘Do you want any help with
your bags?’
‘Oh yes, actually you are sitting on my doorstep.’
‘So why were you crying?’ the ship woman said in her bright pink kitchen. It 25
transpired that she was called Isabella Blow, she was contributing editor at Vogue 3
and something of a fashion maverick. We’d put the bags down and she was making
tea in a proper teapot.
‘I was crying about my future. My mother doesn’t understand me and I don’t know
30
what I’ll do. Oh, it’s so awful.’
‘Don’t worry about that. Pfff!’ she said. ‘Do you want to be a model?’
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If it had been a film there would have been the audible ting of a fairy wand. I looked
at her incredulously. ‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of avoiding the hell of shorthand. My next
question was, ‘Are you sure?’
The ‘Are you sure?’ didn’t spring from some sly sense of modesty; it was brutal 35
realism.
Bar my height, I couldn’t have looked less like a model. The only thing I could have
possibly shared with a model was my twisted predilection for chain smoking.
But for sweet Issy, as I came to know her, none of this posed a problem. She saw
40
people as she chose to see them; as grander cinematic versions of themselves.
‘I think,’ she said, her red lips a postbox stamp of approval, ‘you’re like Anita Ekberg 4.’
I pretended I knew who she was talking about.
‘Ah yes, Anita Ekberg,’ I said.
‘Now put on some lipstick and we’ll go and find your mother and tell her we’ve found
you a career.’
45
We celebrated our fortuitous meeting, with my now mollified mother in tow, at a
Japanese restaurant in Mayfair; toasting my possible new career with a wealth of
sushi and tempura.
‘Gosh, you do like to eat,’ Issy said, eyes wide, watching as my chopsticks danced
50
over the plate. I would have said yes but my mouth was full.
When I began modelling I was completely unprepared for the onslaught of curiosity
it carried with it. People had noticed me. Newspapers breathlessly reported my
strange fleshy phenomenon; a welcome backlash, finally, against the X-ray fashion
industry. In the wake of the very angular, it seemed people wanted an anti-waif, a
55
sensual woman who indulged in whatever she wanted.
1
palazzo: a grand house in Italy
2
Sophia Loren: Italian film star
3
Vogue: a leading fashion magazine
4
Anita Ekberg: Scandinavian film star
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4
2
The following passage comes from a short story set in World War Two. Miss Anstruther’s home
has been destroyed by bombing.
(a) Comment on the style and language of the passage.
[15]
(b) Later, Miss Anstruther records her thoughts and feelings about the loss of her home in a
letter to a friend. Write the opening of the letter (between 120–150 words). Base your answer
closely on the material of the original extract.
[10]
She cried, ‘I must go up again. I must get something out. There’s time.’
‘Not a bloody second,’ one of them shouted at her, and pushed her back.
She fought him. ‘Let me go, oh let me go. I tell you I’m going up once more.’
On the landing above, a wall of flame leaped crackling to the ceiling.
‘Go up be damned. Want to go through that?’
They pulled her down with them to the ground floor. She ran out into the street,
shouting for a ladder. Oh God, where are the fire engines? A hundred fires, the
water given out in some places, engines helpless. Everywhere buildings burning,
museums, churches, hospitals, great shops, houses, blocks of flats, north, south,
east, west and centre. Such a raid never was. Miss Anstruther heeded none of it;
with hell blazing and crashing round her, all she thought was, I must get my letters.
Oh dear God, my letters. She pushed again into the inferno, but again she was
dragged back. ‘No one to go in there,’ said the police, for all human life was by now
extricated. No one to go in, and Miss Anstruther’s flat left to be consumed in the
spreading storm of the fire, which was to leave no wrack behind. Everything was
doomed – furniture, books, pictures, china, clothes, manuscripts, silver, everything:
all she thought of was the desk crammed with letters that should have been the
first thing she saved. What had she saved instead? Her wireless, her typewriter, a
suitcase full of books; looking round, she saw that all three had gone from where
she had put them down. Perhaps they were in the safe keeping of the police, more
likely in the wholly unsafe keeping of some rescue-squad man or private looter. Miss
Anstruther cared little. She sat down on the wreckage of the road, sick and shaking,
wholly bereft.
The bombers departed, their job well done. Dawn came, dim and ashy, in a pall
of smoke. The little burial garden was like a garden in a Vesuvian village1, grey in its
ash coat. The air choked with fine drifts of cinders. Mortimer House still burned, for
no one had put it out. A grimy warden with a note-book asked Miss Anstruther, have
you anywhere to go?
‘No,’ she said, ‘I shall stay here.’
‘Better go to a rest centre,’ said the warden, wearily doing his job, not caring where
anyone went, wondering what had happened in North Ealing, where he lived.
Miss Anstruther stayed, watching the red ruin smouldering low. Sometime, she
thought, it will be cool enough to go into.
There followed the haunted, desperate days of search which found nothing. Since
silver and furniture had been wholly consumed, what hope for letters? There was no
charred sliver of the old locked rosewood desk which had held them. The burning
words were burnt, the lines, running small and close and neat down the page, difficult
to decipher, with the o’s and a’s never closed at the top, had run into a flaming void
and would never be deciphered more. Miss Anstruther tried to recall them, as she
sat in the alien room; shutting her eyes, she tried to see again the phrases that,
once you had made them out, lit the page like stars. There had been many hundreds
of letters, spread over twenty-two years. Last year their writer had died; the letters
were all that Miss Anstruther had left of him; she had not yet re-read them; she had
been waiting till she could do so without the devastation of unendurable weeping.
They had lain there, a solace waiting for her when she could take it. Had she taken
it, she could have recalled them better now. As it was, her memory held disjointed
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phrases, could not piece them together. Light of my eyes. You are the sun and the
moon and the stars to me. When I think of you life becomes music, poetry, beauty,
and I am more than myself. It is what lovers have found in all the ages, and no one
has ever found before. The sun flickering through the trees on your hair. And so on. 50
As each phrase came back to her, it jabbed at her heart like a twisting bayonet.
1
Vesuvian village: a village devastated by a volcano
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6
3
The following newspaper article describes the experiences of journalists in a war-torn area.
(a) Comment on the style and language of the passage.
[15]
(b) The same journalist arrives at another destination which is affected by matters beyond her
control. She writes an article about this new location. Write the opening of the article (between
120–150 words). Base your answer closely on the style and language of the original extract.
[10]
The call sometimes comes in the middle of the night. Pack your bags, you are being
deported. Or: we would like to discuss an error in your story – now. Or even: we
have news about your visa inquiry. One evening, a list of 25 names was posted in
the hotel lobby. The following journalists will be leaving tomorrow. No reason, no
discernible pattern. The next morning, all were reprieved. Bags were unpacked,
travel arrangements unpicked.
5
This is part of life as a foreign journalist under virtual house arrest at the five-star
hotel where maddening soft pop plays on an endless loop, portraits of the Brother
Leader hang in the lobby, and armed men stand guard on the gate to prevent
reporters slipping out. It is a world of rumour, paranoia, mistrust, manipulation, 10
frustration and interrupted sleep. North Korea with palm trees was how one of our
number described it.
But we are forbidden from leaving the hotel without a minder. The BBC and
al-Jazeera websites cannot be accessed, although their TV channels are available.
One minder favours long, intense conversations with journalists about the virtues 15
and magnanimity of “the Guide”, aka the Leader. Everywhere we go on governmentorganised trips “spontaneous” demonstrations of ardent loyalists erupt.
How long have you been here, when are you leaving and what’s happening are the
most common questions we ask one another. There is no routine or pattern to the
days. Ask a minder if an organised trip is likely to depart, and he will shrug and say: 20
“Maybe.” Hours can slip by waiting for something that never materialises.
The camaraderie among the foreign press corps is occasionally punctuated by small
explosions of frustration and competition. “I’ve been doing this job for twenty years,”
a reporter yelled at a cameraman in a scrum the other night. “It doesn’t show,” came
the instant putdown.
25
The mutual support between journalists came perilously close to collapse last week
when the government minders said they would take a small number on a trip to a
city in the west that has seen sustained fighting for several weeks. An unseemly
scramble to get a place on one of the two minibuses ensued. Reporters and TV
teams pleaded to be included; some tried to force their way past the minders on 30
the bus doors, others clambered through the vehicles’ windows. Yet, in a spirit of
solidarity, those left behind thrust flak jackets through the windows for colleagues
without body armour as the buses moved off.
The following day, another trip to the city was laid on. It was a ten-hour round journey
during which we saw precisely nothing apart from a few columns of black smoke in 35
the distance. The minders decided to take a long detour on the way back, citing
danger on the main highway. We got back to the hotel after midnight – at which point
a press conference was announced.
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Late-night press briefings are a feature of life here. This week, one began at 1.30am.
A TV cameraman filmed the event in his hotel bathrobe. Another night, I had just 40
got into bed hoping for an early night when the familiar ding-dong of the public
address system disturbed the peace of my room. “Good evening everyone,” the
announcements usually begin. “To all journalists: there will be a press conference in
ten minutes/half an hour/an hour/now.” We are never told the subject or the speaker,
and they never start on time.
45
Government officials regularly berate us for our lack of professionalism, objectivity,
accuracy. To be lectured on journalistic ethics when we are not allowed to move
around freely or talk to unauthorised citizens is rich in irony…
Rumours and speculation abound. One journalist refused to eat hot food during
his stay, believing it was spiked with sedatives. Others nurse suspicions about how 50
the minders manage to stay awake virtually round the clock. Is there a team in the
basement listening to our phone calls and monitoring our emails? Is it possible to
escape through the kitchen? Are the waiting and cleaning staff spies? Why do some
people’s computers suddenly lose internet connection when others remain online?
Who is that guy who keeps photographing us at press conferences? Why have 55
scores of hideous paintings been hung on the hotel walls in the past few days?
Mindful of the tightened budgets of their news organisations, many journalists try
to contain their soaring hotel bills by skipping meals. One who regularly dined on
cream crackers and peanut butter in his room found, upon checkout, that the hotel
had charged him for lunch and dinner every day, regardless. After fifteen minutes of 60
fruitless argument, he gave up and paid. At the hotel, it’s easy to lose the will to fight
back.
© UCLES 2013
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BLANK PAGE
Copyright Acknowledgements:
Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
© Sophie Dahl; How Food Has Shaped My Life; The Daily Mail; 2009.
© Rose Macaulay; Miss Anstruther’s Letters, in ed. Storm Jameson; London Calling; Reproduced by permission of HarperCollins
Publishers. Reprinted by permission of The Peters Fraser and Dunlop Group Ltd.
© Harriet Sherwood; No Freedom for Foreign Press at Tripoli’s Rixos Hotel; The Guardian News & Media Ltd; 14 April 2011.
Permission to reproduce items where third-party owned material protected by copyright is included has been sought and cleared where possible. Every
reasonable effort has been made by the publisher (UCLES) to trace copyright holders, but if any items requiring clearance have unwittingly been included, the
publisher will be pleased to make amends at the earliest possible opportunity.
University of Cambridge International Examinations is part of the Cambridge Assessment Group. Cambridge Assessment is the brand name of University of
Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES), which is itself a department of the University of Cambridge.
© UCLES 2013
8287/13/M/J/13