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Paper 2 AQA GCSE English Language Hanna Gough

GCSE English Language Paper 2: 19th and 20th Century non-fiction.

AO1: Identify and interpret explicit and implicit information and ideas.Select and synthesise evidence from different texts

AO2: Explain, comment on and analyse how writers use language and structure to achieve effects and influence readers, using relevant subject terminology to support their views

AO3: Compare writers’ ideas and perspectives, as well as how these are conveyed, across two or more text

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Name:

Class:

Questions featured:

Question 2: You need to refer to source A and source B for this question.

People in London are facing different housing issues to people in Wigan.

Write a summary of the differences between housing in London and housing in Wigan. [8 marks]

Question 3:

You now need to refer only to source A.

How does the writer use language to describe the slum of St.Giles?

[12 marks]

Question 4:

For this question you need to refer to the whole of source A and the whole of source B.

Compare how the writers convey different aspects of the living conditions of the poor.

[16 marks]

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Source A: Extract from The Great Towns by Friedrich Engels (1845)

Every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can. These slums are pretty equally arranged in all the great towns of England, the worst houses in the worst quarters of the towns; usually one- or two-storied cottages in long rows, perhaps with cellars used as dwellings, almost always irregularly built. These houses of three or four rooms and a kitchens form, throughout England, some parts of London excepted, the general dwellings of the working-class. The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building of the whole quarter, and since many human beings here live crowded into a small space, the atmosphere that prevails in these working-men's quarters may readily be imagined. Further, the streets serve as drying grounds in fine weather; lines are stretched across from house to house, and hung with wet clothing.

Let us investigate some of the slums in their order. London comes first, [4] and in London the famous rookery of St. Giles which is now, at last, about to be penetrated by a couple of broad streets. St. Giles is in the midst of the most populous part of the town, surrounded by broad, splendid avenues in which the gay world of London idles about, in the immediate neighbourhood of Oxford

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Street, Regent Street, of Trafalgar Square and the Strand. It is a disorderly collection of tall, three- or four-storied houses, with narrow, crooked, filthy streets, in which there is quite as much life as in the great thoroughfares of the town, except that, here, people of the working-class only are to be seen. A vegetable market is held in the street, baskets with vegetables and fruits, naturally all bad and hardly fit to use obstruct the sidewalk still further, and from these, as well as from the fish-dealers' stalls, arises a horrible smell. The houses are occupied from cellar to garret, filthy within and without, and their appearance is such that no human being could possibly wish to live in them. But all this is nothing in comparison with the dwellings in the narrow courts and alleys between the streets, entered by covered passages between the houses, in which the filth and tottering ruin surpass all description. Scarcely a whole window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling, door-posts and window-frames loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed together, or altogether wanting in this thieves' quarter, where no doors are needed, there being nothing to steal. Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all directions, and the foul liquids emptied before the doors gather in stinking pools. Here live the poorest of the poor, the worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction, and those who have not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to resist the demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings.

Nor is St. Giles the only London slum. In the immense tangle of streets, there are hundreds and thousands of alleys and courts lined with houses too bad for anyone to live in, who can still spend anything whatsoever upon a dwelling fit for human beings. Close to the splendid houses of the rich such a lurking-place of the bitterest poverty may often be found. So, a short time ago, on the occasion of a coroner's inquest, a region close to Portman Square, one of the very respectable squares, was characterised as an abode "of a multitude of Irish demoralised by poverty and filth". So, too, may be found in streets, such as Long Acre and others, which, though not fashionable, are yet "respectable", a great number of cellar dwellings out of which puny children and half-starved, ragged women emerge into the light of day. In the immediate neighbourhood of Drury Lane Theatre, the second in London, are some of the worst streets of the whole metropolis, Charles, King, and Park Streets, in which the houses are inhabited from cellar to garret exclusively by poor families. In the parishes of St. John and St. Margaret there lived in 1840, according to the Journal of the Statistical Society, 5,566 working-men's families in 5,294 "dwellings" (if they deserve the name!), men, women, and children thrown together without distinction of age or sex, 26,850 persons all told; and of these families three-fourths possessed but one room. In the aristocratic parish of St. George, Hanover Square, there lived, according to the same authority, 1,465 working-men's families, nearly 6,000 persons, under similar conditions, and here, too, more than two-thirds of the whole number crowded together at the rate of one family in one room. And how the poverty of these unfortunates, among whom even thieves find nothing to steal, is exploited by the property-holding class in lawful ways! The abominable

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dwellings in Drury Lane, just mentioned, bring in the following rents: two cellar dwellings, 3s., one room, ground-floor, 4s.; second-storey, 4s. 6d.; third-floor, 4s.; garret-room, 3s. weekly, so that the starving occupants of Charles Street alone, pay the house-owners a yearly tribute of £2,000, and the 5,566 families above mentioned in Westminster, a yearly rent of £40,000.

Word bank: List here any words that you don’t know. Look up their definitions.

Comprehension for source A:

1. Which city is Friedrich Engels talking about in this extract? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

2. Generally, where can you expect to find slums across England? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

3. What might you typically see when you walk into a slum? Give three examples: ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

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……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

4. How do the houses appear in slums? What do they usually look like? …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

5. In which quarter can you find houses with no windows or doors? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

6. What kinds of people live in these slums? Can you name three types?…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

7. Where are most of the poor people from, according to Engels? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

8. How many alleys and courts are lined with houses ‘too bad for anyone to live in’? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

9. In the parishes of St John and St Margaret, three quarters of families only possessed how many rooms in a house? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

10.Who exploits these impoverished people? …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Turn over for source B!

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Source B: Extract from The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell (1937)

I found great variation in the houses I visited. Some were as decent as one could possibly expect in the circumstances, some were so appalling that I have no hope of describing them adequately. To begin with, the smell, the dominant and essential thing, is indescribable. But the squalor and the confusion! A tub full of filthy water here, a basin full of unwashed crocks there, more crocks piled in any odd corner, torn newspaper littered everywhere, and in the middle always the same dreadful table covered with sticky oilcloth and crowded with cooking pots and irons and half-darned stockings and pieces of stale bread and bits of cheese wrapped round with greasy newspaper! And the congestion in a tiny room where getting from one side to the other is a complicated voyage between pieces of furniture, with a line of damp washing getting you in the face every time you move and the children as thick underfoot as toadstools! There are scenes that stand out vividly in my memory. The almost bare living-room of a cottage in a little mining village, where the whole family was out of work and everyone seemed to be underfed; and the big family of grown-up sons and daughters sprawling aimlessly about, all strangely alike with red hair, splendid bones, and pinched faces ruined by malnutrition and idleness; and one tall son sitting by the fire-place, too listless even to notice the entry of a stranger, and slowly peeling a sticky sock from a bare foot. A dreadful room in Wigan where all the furniture seemed to be made of packing cases and barrel staves and was coming to pieces at that; and an old woman with a blackened neck and her hair coining down denouncing her landlord in a Lancashire-Irish accent; and her mother, aged well over ninety, sitting in the background on the barrel that served her as a commode and regarding us blankly with a yellow, cretinous face. I could fill up pages with memories of similar interiors.

Of course the squalor of these people's houses is some-times their own fault. Even if you live in a back to back house and have four children and a total income of thirty-two and sixpence a week from the P.A.C., there is no need to have unemptied chamber-pots standing about in your living-room. But it is equally certain that their circumstances do not encourage self-respect. The determining factor is probably the number of children. The best-kept interiors I saw were always childless houses or houses where there were only one or two children; with, say, six children in a three-roomed house it is quite impossible to keep anything decent. One thing that is very noticeable is that the worst squalors are never downstairs. You might visit quite a number of houses, even among the poorest of the unemployed, and bring away a wrong impression. These people, you might reflect, cannot be so badly off if they still have a fair amount of furniture and crockery. But it is in the rooms upstairs that the gauntness of poverty really discloses itself. Whether this is because pride makes people cling to their living-room furniture to the last, or because bedding is more pawnable, I do not know, but certainly many of the bedrooms I saw were fearful places. Among people who have been unemployed for several years continuously I should say it is the exception to have anything like a full set of

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bedclothes. Often there is nothing that can be properly called bedclothes at all—just a heap of old overcoats and miscellaneous rags on a rusty iron bedstead. In this way overcrowding is aggravated. One family of four persons that I knew, a father and mother and two children, possessed two beds but could only use one of them because they had not enough bedding for the other.

Anyone who wants to see the effects of the housing shortage at their very worse should visit the dreadful caravan-dwellings that exist in numbers in many of the northern towns. Ever since the war, in the complete impossibility of getting houses, parts of the population have overflowed into supposedly temporary quarters in fixed caravans. Wigan, for instance, with a population of about 85,000, has round about 200 caravan-dwellings with a family in each—perhaps somewhere near 1000 people in all. How many of these caravan-colonies exist throughout the industrial areas it would be difficult to discover with any accuracy. The local authorities are reticent about them and the census report of 1931 seems to have decided to ignore them. But so far as I can discover by inquiry they are to be found in most of the larger towns in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and perhaps further north as well. The probability is that throughout the north of England there are some thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of families (not individuals) who have no home except a fixed caravan.

But the word 'caravan' is very misleading. It calls up a picture of a cosy gypsy-encampment (in fine weather, of course) with wood fires crackling and children picking blackberries and many-coloured washing fluttering on the lines. The caravan-colonies in Wigan and Sheffield are not like that. I had a look at several of them, I inspected those in Wigan with considerable care, and I have never seen comparable squalor except in the Far East. Indeed when I saw them I was immediately reminded of the filthy kennels in which I have seen Indian coolies living in Burma. But, as a matter of fact, nothing in the East could ever be quite as bad, for in the East you haven't our clammy, penetrating cold to contend with, and the sun is a disinfectant.

Word bank: List here any words that you don’t know. Look up their definitions.

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Comprehension for source B:

1. Does Orwell state that all of the houses that he visited were appalling? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

2. Which town is George Orwell writing about in this extract? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

3. What is some of the furniture made of in these living rooms? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

4. Who does Orwell state is ‘sometimes’ to blame for the squalor in people’s houses? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

5. What does Orwell claim is the determining factor when it comes to the state of the interior of a house? ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

6. What can you expect to find on a poor person’s bed instead of bedding? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

7. What is the estimated population of Wigan at this time? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

8. How many people in Lancashire and Yorkshire are estimated to have no proper home? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

9. Where else in the world has Orwell seen an equal amount of squalor?

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……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

10.What advantages do poor people in the East have over people living in squalor in Wigan? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Question 2: Summary

You need to refer to source A and source B for this question.

People in London are facing slightly different housing issues to people in Wigan.

Write a summary of the differences between housing in London and housing in Wigan. [8 marks]

An example for each source has been done for you. You could also suggest differences with the type of people living in each site, the conditions, the occupations etc.

Source A Source B

e.g.The people in St Giles are living in alleyways and have one room per family. They can live anywhere from the ‘cellar to garret’ of a house.

e.g. The people in Wigan have houses or ‘fixed caravans’ but they at least have their own home.

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Which assessment objective have you met within this activity?

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Which assessment objective have you met when answering question 3? (next page)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Question 3: You now need to refer only to source A.

How does the writer use language to describe the slum of St.Giles?

[12 marks]

In the table are six features complete with examples. Try to fill in every box where a feature is missing or a comment on the effect. Remember, to gain level 3 you must clearly discuss the effect. Can you complete a whole row of your own?

Feature Example EffectSuperlative ‘worst houses in the

worst quarters’Encourages the reader to image the lowest possible quality of life and living conditions. Could evoke sympathy.

Listing ‘unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but

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supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead.’

Emotive language ‘many human beings’‘victims of prostitution indiscriminately huddled together’

‘horrible smell’ ‘ Heaps of garbage and ashes lie’

Triggers the reader’s senses and encourages them to imagine the squalor in detail. The reader can feel the same disgust as the writer did when smelling and seeing the slums himself.

Metaphor‘immense tangle of streets’

Juxtaposition‘splendid houses of the rich’‘palaces of the rich’/‘irregularly built’‘filthy within and without’

Question 4:

For this question you need to refer to the whole of source A and the whole of source B.

Compare how the writers convey different aspects of the living conditions of the poor.

[16 marks]

It may help you to first complete this comparison in a table.

The first point for each source has been done for you.

Source A Source B e.g. Engels highlights the overcrowded poor areas of London and states that ‘poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich’. He is directly comparing the homes of the poor with the homes of the rich.

e.g The houses of the rich are not mentioned. Wigan is referred to as ‘mining town’ therefore only miners or mine owners are living and working there. It is assumed that all of these Northern towns Orwell visits are poor.

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Which assessment objective have you met within this activity?

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Reflection checklist:

Complete the table with your honest reflections on each element of this section.

Comment 100% Confident

Why are you more confident about this element than others?

50/50

If so, what could be a solution to achieving 100% confidence?

Not sure at all!

If so, what could be a solution to improving your knowledge of this?

I can read unseen texts and adopt a general understanding of what they are saying.

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I can look up words that I don’t know and find their appropriate definitions.

I know which assessment objective is found in each question.

I can identify and summarise main differences between unseen texts. I can identify language and structural features in an unseen text.

I can comment on the effect of features that have been used in unseen texts.

I can directly compare the different attitudes or perspectives of writers across two texts using evidence from each text.

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Documents

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