CONTEXT QUESTIONS
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Example 1
It seems the childcare pendulum has swung; the principal threat to children is no longer neglectful parents, but excessively protective ones who are always worrying about germs.
Frank Furedi, reader in sociology at the
University of Kent, has written a book,
“Paranoid Parenting”, in which he explores the consequences of too much cossetting .
“It is always important to recall that our obsession with our children’s safety is likely to be more damaging to them than any risks that they are likely to meet with in their daily encounter with the world.”

Example 2

Example 4
Others are, however, convinced that it is only a matter of time before we face
Armageddon . Liberal Democrat MP and sky watcher, Lembit Opik, says “I have said for years that the chance of an asteroid having an impact which could wipe out most of the human race is 100 per cent.”
He has raised his worries in the Commons, successfully campaigned for an all party task force to assess the potential risk and helped set up the Spaceguard UK facility to track near-earth objects.

Example 4
 If you hail from Glasgow you will have friends or relatives whose roots lie in the Irish Republic. You will have Jewish friends or colleagues whose grandparents, a good number of them Polish or Russian, may have fled persecution in Europe. You will eat in premises run by Italian or
French proprietors. It is a diverse cultural heritage enriched no by a large and vibrant Asian population.

Example 5
 Within weeks of his passing, the first sightings were reported of the supposedly dead Elvis, waiting in a supermarket queue, driving a truck, serving burgers, or filling up at a gas station – revealingly, usually involved in the mundane, blue – collar situations routinely undertaken by most of his fans. Though in life he had become a rich recluse, a person apart from his public, in death he could now become one of them again.

Example 6
 What is presented to the reader of romance novels is a polarisation of gender roles , where the men are tough and the women are vulnerable; the heroes are dominant and the heroines like children in their lack of self determination which reaches it’s extreme form in the
‘bandit story’ where the heroine is literally captured by a man with whom she cannot help falling in love.

IMAGERY QUESTIONS
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Key strategies :
You must show that you understand the literal ‘root’ of the image
You must show how the writer is extending this metaphorically to help make a point.
Simply picking out the words which contain the image will score no marks.
Adding lots of vague comments which are not tied to understanding and analysis of the image will also score no marks.

Example 1
 Question : Show how effective you find the writer’s use of imagery to convey the feeligs about what happened to Muhammed Ali’s money.
 One fight I attended in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, showed a fascinating insight into how the money haemorrhaged . He was accompanied by a posse of 44 people, of whom perhaps only six were professionally involved. The rest were relatives, friends of relatives, old pals of Ali who had fallen on hard times, and outright leeches . Daily they plundered the hotel’s shopping mall amassing clothes, jewellery and tacky souvenirs, all charged to Ali’s account.

Example 2
 Question: Discuss how effctive you find the writer’s use of imagery in making her point
(disapproval of proposed measures) clear
 Yet at the heart of this ever more draconian approach to immigration policy lie a number of misconceptions. The UK is not a group of nations swamped by a tidal wave of immigration. Relatively speaking,
Europe contends with a trickle of refugees compared to countries who border areas of famine, desperate poverty, or violent political upheaval.

Example 3
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Question: How effective do you find the image of ‘battery hens’ in conveying the writer’s view of the way in which children are currently being brought up?
 I am tired of these prophets of death and injury. I do not need to Royal society for the Prevention of Accidents to tell me that children should wear helmets while sledging, because I am incensed at the thought of hundreds of poor kids whose parents will now ban them from sledging on the five-million-to-one chance that they might hit a tree. I mourn also for the kids who will never know the delight of cycling with the wind in their hair, or climbing up trees, or exploring hidden places. Growing up devoid of freedom, decision- making, and the opportunity to learn from taking their own risks, our children are becoming trapped, neurotic, and as genetically weakened as battery hens .

Example 4
 Question: Explain how the image supports the writer’s point regarding the changes in attitude towards childcare.
 It seems the childcare pendulum has swung: the principal threat to children is no longer neglectful parents, but excessively protective ones who are always worrying about germs.

Example 5
 Question: Show how effective you find the writer’s use of imagery in conveying the excitement of the debate.
 Many details referred to in our story are still controversial. Debate is particularly heated as regards the role of impacts in directing the course of human history. All of this is very exciting. The whole topic is in a state of ferment , a symptom that something significant is brewing .

WORD CHOICE
 Key strategies:
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You are being asked to select a key word and show how the connotations of this word are being utilised by the writer.
You must focus clearly on one word or phrase .
There are no marks for simply identifying the words
There are no marks for simply repeating the question.
A useful strategy can be to compare the word you’ve chosen with a more ‘neutral’ word , eg.
“she strode into the room”. A more neutral word would have been ‘walked’. DIFFERENCE: the choice of ‘strode’ implies a purposeful action by a confident person.

Example 1
Question: Show how the writer’s word choice emphasise the devastating effects of asteroid impact.
In the longer term the problem of being hit by an asteroid will be the amount of material that is injected into the Earth’s atmosphere. Within two or three days the surface of the Earth will be cold and dark. And it is the dark which will be the problem, because the plants will begin to die out. At best guess, we will probably lose about 25 per cent of the human population in the first six months or so.
The rest of us are basically back in the Middle Ages.
We have got no power, no communications, no infrastructure. We are back to the hunter-gathering.

Example 2
Question: Show how the writer’s word choice conveys the impact of the destruction of the boy’s baseball bat.
But, the bat broke. Some kid used it without my permission. He hit a foul ball and the bat split, the barrel flying away, the splintered handle still in the kid’s hands.

Example 3
Question: Show how the writer uses word choice to highlight his feelings about what has happened to the old people.
Even the universal image of old age as the time of superior wisdom is passing away.
We no longer have Elders whose counsel is precious and who must be respected.
This debunking was already underway with
Shakespeare’s sardonic Seven Ages in “As
You Like It.”

Example 4
Question : Show how the writer uses word choice to convey the intensity of his feelings about Muhammed Ali.
That was 1966 and Muhammed Ali seemed not simply the best boxer of the day but the best boxer who could possibly be imagined – so good that it was an inspiration to see even a picture of him. My body shivered when I saw him as if an electric shock had pulverised my ability to feel. No fighter could touch him. His self knowledge was glorious, so transcendently fixed was he on the only two subjects he knew: himself and boxing. He so filled me with his holy spirit that whenever our side needed a rally, I would call out Ali’s chant to my team mates, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!” It was for me, the summer of
1966, Ali’s absoluter moment of black possibilities fulfilled.
And I wanted that and had it for a moment, too, had I, perhaps, among the neighbourhood guys, the touch and glory of the great Ali.

SENTENCE STRUCTURE
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Example 1
Question: Show how the writer uses sentence structure to demonstrate her strength of feeling.
Yet Ireland has managed to attract its young entrepreneurs back to help drive a burgeoning economy. We must try to do likewise. We need immigrants. We cannot grow the necessary skills fast enough to fill the gap sites. We need people with energy and commitment and motivation, three characteristics commonly found among those whose circumstances prompt them to make huge sacrifices to find a new life.

Example 2
Question: Comment on the effectiveness of the structure of these sentences in illustrating Ed the
Duck’s “childish monstrousness”.
Ed the Duck interrupts when he shouldn’t, snatches what isn’t his, bangs and crashes and sulks and pouts (anatomically difficult for a duck), entirely undermining the parental/elder sibling authority of the presenter.

Example 3
Question: Show in detail how the writer’s sentence structure emphasises the hypocrisy to which he refers .
To all this, most of us (including government ministers) are content to turn a blind eye for most of the time, until some horrible incident – the Aston shootings, the murder of
Damilola Taylor, the Bradford riots – reminds us that there is something rotten at the heart of what we erroneously call modern civilisation. It’s stupendously hypocritical. We rage about a hiccup in exam results affecting a few hundred middle class pupils, but whisper not a word of protest about the thousands dropping out of school unable to spell their own town. We organise our own lives on a philosophy of unbridled me- first consumerism: instant gratification, unfettered by “fusty” notions of voluntary service or social responsibility – and then we profess horror when the same warped hedonism is aped by teenagers brandishing guns.

Example 4
Question: Show how the sentence structure highlights the writer’s views about the obesity debate.
So sections of the market aim to profit from the notion that we are all too fat. We need to contest that. It isn’t the case. Evidence from the professional journals shows that fitness, not fat, determines our mortality. You can be fat, fit and healthy.

Example 5
Question: Identify two ways by which the sentence structure emphasises the change in the concerns of “right thinking people”.
When the world was a simpler place, the rich were fat, the poor were thin, and rightthinking people worried about how to feed the hungry. Now, in much of the world, the rich are thin, the poor are fat, and rightthinking people are worrying about obesity.

Example 6
Question: Explain briefly the function of the colon and the dashes in the following extract.
The proliferation of Elvis sightings has become a collective joke since then, most now firmly being propounded with tongue firmly in cheek. Sometimes the jokes are quite funny: only a few days ago, some punter laid a 5p bet at odds of 20 million to one that Elvis would ride into London on Shergar to play tennis against Lord Lucan in the Wimbledon finals. Always one for a laugh – like many in the
1970’s, he could apparently recite various Monty
Python routines by heart – Elvis himself would probably have appreciated that gag.

Example 7
Question : How does the writer use punctuation to make clear her point of view (that old people are not to be identified as a “growing social problem”)?
When we are old there is more time for gossiping
(men talk to discuss; women gossip, don’t they?) I see old women together arm in arm negotiating the slippery pavement or rough steps. I see them with their trolleys gossiping together in the supermarket and I rejoice that we have each other, that the older we grow the more women of our own age there are around us. We are not going to be identified as “a growing social problem”, as the social commentators would have us labelled, but as a thriving, gossiping and defiant sisterhood.

TONE
 Key strategies:
 Sometimes you will have to identify the tone of a passage or a part of it and then go on to explain how the tone is created; on other occasions you will be told what the tone is and your whole answer will have to deal with how it is created.
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The “how” part is often done best by exploring other aspects of language such as sentence structure, imagery and word choice. Also, features such as sound, exaggeration and anti-climax are often used to establish tone.
 You should learn to recognise a variety of tones – anger, contempt, regret, nostalgia, irony, humour…

Example 1
Question: Identify the tone and explain by close reference to the text how it is created.
Perhaps the obsessives and weirdos are right: Elvis will never die. Or, to paraphrase the more religious of these obsessives, he died only to rise again, more powerful than ever.
But then, they’re nuts. The End.

Example 2
Question: Explain clearly how the writer establishes a rather tongue-in-cheek tone.
Let’s start with a little cheery poetry. As you can probably deduce, Shakespeare it ain’t.
Incidentally, when the author uses the word
“hoe”, he means “bitch” – or “girlfriend” as we used to say in gentler times:
“After I stick ya, rip ya like a razor
Watch me erase ya, misplace ya…
I throw a bomb through your window
Burn you up and your hoe”

Example 3
Question: Identify the tone and explain how this tone is conveyed.
I am fed-up listening to scaremongers about the E-coli virus, telling me my child should never visit a farm or come into contact with animals. I am 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 hand attack overprotective parents and at the same time say children should never be left unsupervised in a public place.

Example 4
Question: Explain how the writer creates a slightly humorous tone.
Survivors of essentially random impact catastrophes – “cosmic accidents” – were those creatures who just happened to be
“lucky” enough to find themselves alive after the dust settled. It doesn’t matter how well as creature may have been able to survive in a particular environment before the event – being thumped on the head by a large object from space during the event is not conducive to a long and happy existence.