Total marks: 80 · Duration: 1 hour 45 minutes
Instructions to candidates
• Answer all questions in both Section A and Section B. • You must have the Insert for Section A. Write your answers in this answer booklet. • You are advised to spend about 15 minutes reading through the sources and all five questions you have to answer. • You are advised to spend about 45 minutes on Section A and about 45 minutes on Section B. • The maximum mark for this paper is 80. • There are 40 marks for Section A and 40 marks for Section B. • Source A and Source B are both original texts written for this practice paper. Source B imitates the style of a nineteenth-century letter. The paragraphs of each source are numbered so that you can find them quickly.
Paper
Section A: Reading (40 marks)
Answer all questions in this section. You are advised to spend about 45 minutes on this section.
Question 1
Read again the first part of Source A, paragraphs 1 and 2.
Choose four statements below which are true.
• Write the letters of the four true statements in your answer booklet. • Choose a maximum of four statements.
A. The writer stayed in the sea for several minutes on her first attempt. B. The writer's friend timed how long she stayed in the water. C. The writer's friend was also swimming in the sea at the time. D. The writer lost feeling in her hands while she was in the water. E. The writer's friend laughed at the way the writer left the sea. F. The writer had swum in the open sea many times as a child. G. Before that winter, the writer had only swum in places with a lifeguard. H. The writer took up sea swimming because a doctor advised it.
(4 marks)
Question 2
You need to refer to Source A and Source B for this question.
Use details from both sources. Write a summary of the differences between the two writers' experiences of going into the sea.
(8 marks)
Question 3
You now need to refer only to Source B, paragraphs 3 and 4.
How does the writer use language to describe her experience of being "dipped" in the sea?
(12 marks)
Question 4
For this question, you need to refer to the whole of Source A, together with the whole of Source B.
Compare how the writers convey their different attitudes to swimming in the sea.
In your answer, you could: • compare their different attitudes • compare the methods the writers use to convey their attitudes • support your response with references to both texts.
(16 marks)
Section B: Writing (40 marks)
You are advised to spend about 45 minutes on this section. Write in full sentences. You are reminded of the need to plan your answer. You should leave enough time to check your work at the end.
Question 5
"Young people today spend far too much of their lives indoors and in front of screens. Every school should make outdoor activities — such as swimming, hiking and camping — a compulsory part of the school week."
Write an article for a broadsheet newspaper in which you explain your point of view on this statement.
(24 marks for content and organisation 16 marks for technical accuracy) [40 marks]
Insert for Section A
Source A — 21st-century non-fiction
This is an extract from a newspaper column written by a woman who began swimming in the sea during the winter.
[1] The first time I walked into the North Sea in January, I lasted forty seconds. I know this because my friend Priya was timing me from the shingle, wrapped in a hooded changing robe the size of a small tent, shouting out the numbers like a drill sergeant. At twenty, the water had reached my thighs and my feet had simply disappeared. At thirty, I could no longer tell where my hands ended and the sea began. At forty, I turned and ran — or rather lurched, knees high, mouth open, making a noise I did not know I could make — back up the beach, where Priya was laughing so hard that she had to sit down on the stones.
[2] I was forty-three years old. Until that winter I had never swum anywhere that did not come with a lifeguard, a chlorine smell and a vending machine. Swimming, for me, was something you did in a rectangle, in lanes, at the speed indicated on a laminated sign. The sea was for looking at. It was for postcards and paddling and the occasional brave, shrieking dash in August. It was not, as far as I was concerned, somewhere a sensible adult went voluntarily in the dark at seven o'clock on a weekday morning.
[3] Cold-water swimming, we are now told, is the new yoga. Barely a week goes by without a glossy feature promising that a daily dip will cure anxiety, banish colds, burn fat and generally turn you into a radiant, rosy-cheeked version of yourself who owns a great many woolly hats. I am suspicious of anything that promises to fix everything. I am even more suspicious when it involves a large shop selling the equipment. I did not start because of the science, such as it is. I started because my marriage had ended, my children had left home, and I needed something — anything — that would make me feel more than numb.
[4] What nobody tells you is how frightening the first minute is. The body has its own opinion about cold water, and that opinion is: get out. The breath is torn out of you in great ragged gulps. Your heart hammers. Every instinct you possess screams that you are in danger, and, for that first minute, you are. The swimmers I now know talk about it with the calm respect that sailors reserve for the weather. You go in slowly. You never go alone. You breathe out, long and slow, until the panic passes. And then — this is the part the glossy features get right — something extraordinary happens. The panic passes.
[5] By February I was going in three times a week. I discovered that there is a whole society down on that beach before sunrise, a society that no one in my office knew existed. There is Dennis, a retired postman who has swum every day for nineteen years and treats the rest of us as promising but unreliable apprentices. There is a nurse who comes straight from her night shift and floats on her back in silence, staring at the sky. There are two sisters in their seventies who wear matching pink caps and argue the entire time. Nobody asks what you do for a living. Nobody cares what you look like in a swimming costume, which, after the age of forty, is a mercy in itself.
[6] I am not going to pretend that the sea has transformed my life. I still worry about money. I still lie awake at three in the morning. My knees still complain on the stairs. But for the three or four minutes that I am in that grey, heaving, indifferent water, there is no room in my head for anything else. There is only the cold, the breath, the sting of salt and the strange, fierce joy of being alive in a body that is, briefly, doing something difficult.
[7] Last week Priya came with me again. She timed me, as she did on that first morning. I stayed in for nine minutes. When I walked out, slowly this time, shaking and grinning, she did not laugh. She just handed me my robe and said, "Who are you?" I am still working out the answer. But I know where I'll be at seven o'clock tomorrow. The sea does not care about my inbox, my bank balance or my ex-husband's new girlfriend. That, it turns out, is exactly the point.
Source B — 19th-century non-fiction
This is an extract from a letter written in 1871 by a young woman, Eleanor, on holiday at a seaside resort with her mother. She is writing to her elder sister, Margaret, who has stayed at home. (Original text written for this paper in the style of the period.)
[1] My dearest Margaret, You will scarcely credit it, but I have bathed in the sea — I, who could not bring myself to step into the duck pond at Aunt Harriet's without a fuss. Mamma consented only because Dr Fenwick declared that the salt air and the shock of cold water would do wonders for my nerves and my complexion, and Mamma has the greatest faith in Dr Fenwick, who charges her a guinea for every opinion.
[2] You must understand that one does not simply walk into the waves as the fishermen's children do. There is a great deal of ceremony. At nine o'clock each morning a long row of bathing machines stands at the water's edge — little wooden huts upon wheels, painted white and blue, each with a door at the back and a set of steps at the front. One climbs in upon the dry sand, and while one undresses in the gloom, a horse draws the whole contrivance, rocking and creaking most alarmingly, out into the sea. By the time I had fastened my bathing gown (a dreadful garment of brown flannel, which hangs upon one like a sack of wet oats), the water was slapping against the wheels and I could hear the sea hissing beneath the floor.
[3] Then came the moment I had dreaded. The door at the front was flung open, and there below me stood Mrs Dunn, the dipper — a woman of enormous size and still more enormous strength, with arms like the legs of mutton we have on Sundays, and a voice that could be heard, I am certain, in France. "Come along, Miss," she bellowed. "Down you come and under you go!" Before I could so much as plead, she had seized me about the waist and plunged me beneath the water like a kitten in a pail.
[4] Oh, Margaret, I cannot describe it! The cold was not like any cold I have known. It was a blow, a great icy fist that struck the very breath from my body, so that when I came up I could only gasp and splutter like a landed fish. My hair came down entirely. The salt stung my eyes and filled my nose and mouth. Twice more she plunged me, and twice more I rose, half-drowned, half-frozen, and — I confess it to you alone — wholly, wonderfully delighted. For when I stood at last in the shallows, with the waves breaking about my knees and the whole wide glittering bay before me, I felt such a rush of warmth and life as I have never felt in any drawing room.
[5] Mamma, who would not bathe for all the tea in China, watched the whole performance through her spy-glass from the promenade, and pronounced it "quite sufficient for one morning". She is determined that we shall not be thought fast. You would laugh to see how the gentlemen's machines are drawn up at a respectable distance down the beach, and how fiercely the ladies peer through their glasses to make sure that they remain there. There is a gentleman's rule, it seems, for everything — and a lady's rule for everything else.
[6] And yet I have formed a secret resolution, which you must not breathe to Mamma. Frederick wrote to me last week of how he swims each morning at college, right out across the river and back, as freely as a fish. I do not see why a girl should not do the same. Mrs Dunn has promised, for an extra sixpence, to teach me to float. If I can float, I can learn to swim; and if I can swim, dearest sister, I do not think I shall ever again be content to sit upon the sand and merely look at the sea.
Your ever loving sister, Eleanor