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Question 6: Evaluating Non-Fiction Practice Questions

Question 1

15 marks

Text 2

In this blog post, a sixteen-year-old describes giving up Saturdays to help in a charity shop that sells second-hand books, clothes and household goods.

1Everyone assumes the worst thing about working in a charity shop is
the smell. It isn’t. The smell (old coats, lavender, something that
might once have been soup) wears off after about twenty minutes.
The worst thing is the till, which has a mind of its own. The best
5thing, by miles, is the customers.
I started on Saturdays last spring, mainly because I needed
something to put on my sixth-form application. I pictured myself
quietly folding jumpers. Instead I spent my first morning learning
to price a glass fruit bowl from Pat, who is seventy-eight and has
10volunteered there since before I was born.
Here is what nobody tells you: a charity shop is a sort of living
room for the whole street. There is Mr Okafor, who arrives every
Saturday at ten, reads the back of every crime novel on the shelf
and buys exactly one, always for fifty pence. He has never once
15bought a book he has already read, and he keeps no list. There is
the woman who wanted ‘a book my mum had when she was little – it
had a horse on the front’. She couldn’t remember the title or the
author. It took us three Saturdays, but we found it. (It was a
pony. Close enough.) She cried a bit at the counter, and so,
20embarrassingly, did I.
Not everyone is easy. Some people haggle over a forty-pence mug as
if their lives depend on it. One man asked us to put a lamp aside
for him, promised four times that he’d be back on Friday, and never
came. Pat just said, ‘Maybe he needed to say it more than he needed
25the lamp,’ and put it back in the window.
Some regulars don’t buy anything at all. Sid comes in on wet
afternoons, mostly to get warm and talk about the cricket. At first
I wondered why we let him stay so long. Now I save him the sports
pages from the donated newspapers, and I worry if he misses a week.
30The work itself is not glamorous. The stockroom is freezing in
January, the donation bags are full of dust, and after you have
sorted your five-hundredth paperback, books stop feeling magical
and start feeling heavy.
But I haven’t fallen out of love with them. If anything, I read
35more now, because every book that comes through the door belonged
to somebody, and every customer who comes in is looking for
something, even if it is only a chat. I don’t get paid a penny. I
would go every Saturday anyway.

Original passage.

Glossary

  • charity shop: a shop that sells donated second-hand goods to raise money for a charity; most of its staff are unpaid volunteers
  • sixth-form application: a form a student fills in to apply for a place to study after GCSEs
  • till: the machine that records sales and holds the money
  • regulars: customers who come in often
  • stockroom: the room at the back of a shop where goods are kept and sorted

Read Text 2 again.

In this extract, the writer attempts to show that the customers are the best part of working in a charity shop.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved.

Support your views with detailed reference to the text.

Question 2

15 marks

Text 2

In this blog post, an eighteen-year-old describes running out of food on a Sunday in Italy during a month of travelling around Europe by train on a very small budget.

1I had planned everything except being hungry. My spreadsheet said
twenty euros a day, and for the first week I was smug about it:
supermarket bread, a jar of peanut butter that came with me across
four countries, and nights on trains so I never paid for a bed.
5Budget travel, I told my friends, is just a puzzle you solve with a
calculator.
Then I got stuck in a small Italian town on a Sunday. My night
train didn’t leave until eleven. The supermarket was shut. The only
café still open wanted twelve euros for a sandwich, which in my
10spreadsheet was most of a day. I asked whether they could fill my
water bottle, and the man behind the counter pointed at the bottles
in the fridge without looking up. A family at an outside table
watched me walk away. I felt about six years old.
I sat on a bench outside the station and did the maths again, as if
15the numbers might change. My bank card was in my bag. There was
money in my account for emergencies, and if I had been honest with
myself, I would have admitted that a few hungry hours were not an
emergency. It was only uncomfortable, and I wasn’t used to it.
That was where Rosa found me. She cleaned the station, and on her
20break she sat at the other end of my bench with a plastic box of
pasta. She asked, in a mixture of Italian and hand signals, whether
I had eaten. I lied and said yes. She looked at my peanut butter
jar, scraped clean, laughed, and pushed the box towards me.
I tried to refuse. I tried to pay her. She was offended by both. In
25the end we shared it, two forks, while she showed me photos of her
grandson on a cracked phone. When my train came, she pressed a
paper bag into my hands: two peaches, a bread roll, and a pair of
her own thick grey socks, ‘because the trains are cold at night’.
She was right. They were.
30I have thought about Rosa a lot since. I had chosen to have no
money for a month; she had not chosen anything. I was the one with
a rail pass and a bank card, and she was the one who gave. I would
love to say I learned to travel more cheaply. What I learned is
that I was never really poor at all, and that the kindest person I
35met all summer had the least to spare.
I still have the socks. I wear them on every long journey, and I
still feel slightly ashamed when I do.

Original passage.

Glossary

  • spreadsheet: a computer table used to plan and add up numbers, such as a budget
  • rail pass: a ticket that allows unlimited train travel for a set period

Read Text 2 again.

In this extract, the writer attempts to show what they learned about money and kindness on a budget journey.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved.

Support your views with detailed reference to the text.

Question 3

15 marks

Text 2

In this blog post, a sixteen-year-old describes a first Saturday shift washing up in the kitchen of a busy café.

1Nobody warns you that a kitchen has its own weather. At nine
o’clock on Saturday morning, when I tied on my apron for my first
ever shift at the café, it was cool and quiet and smelled of
coffee. By eleven it was a tropical storm: steam rolled out of the
5dishwasher every time I lifted the hood, the grill spat, and the
back door was propped open with a bucket in a hopeless attempt to
let some air in.
I applied for the job because I wanted my own money. I’m sixteen,
so I’m paid the youth rate, and I’d worked out that four Saturdays
10would just about buy a pair of trainers. I had pictured myself
behind the counter, handing out slices of cake. Instead, I was the
kitchen porter, which is a polite way of saying the person who
washes everything.
And I mean everything. Plates, mugs, a frying pan the size of a car
15tyre, a tray of trays. The noise was unbelievable: the ticket
machine chattering out orders, pans clattering, the radio fighting
the extractor fan and losing, and Marta, the head chef, calling
‘Service!’ as if her life depended on it. On my first trip out with
a stack of clean plates, I put them on the wrong shelf, and she had
20to hunt for them in the middle of the rush. I braced myself. She
just laughed, showed me the right shelf and said, ‘Everyone does
that once. Do it twice and you’re on onions.’
That was what surprised me most. Everyone was in a hurry, but
nobody was horrible. Jay, who has worked on the grill for three
25years, slid me a bowl of leftover chips at half past two and told
me I was ‘faster than the last one’. I have decided to take that as
a compliment.
By the time we closed at four, my fingers were as wrinkled as
raisins, my feet throbbed and my hair smelled of bacon. I fell
30asleep on the bus home and nearly missed my stop. I had earned just
under fifty-five pounds, and I have never been so proud of a number
in my life.
So would I recommend it? Honestly, yes. It is hot and hard, and you
will smell of bacon. But you will learn more in one Saturday about
35teamwork, and about keeping your head when everything happens at
once, than in a month of lie-ins. And you get the chips.

Original passage.

Glossary

  • kitchen porter: the member of kitchen staff who washes up and cleans
  • youth rate: the lower minimum wage paid to workers under 18
  • ticket machine: a printer that prints customers' orders for the kitchen
  • on onions: given the job of peeling and chopping onions

Read Text 2 again.

In this extract, the writer attempts to show that a first job can be hard work but worth it.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved.

Support your views with detailed reference to the text.

Question 4

15 marks

Text 2

In this blog post, a seventeen-year-old looks back on a year spent campaigning for a safe crossing on the busy road outside their school.

1Everyone has an opinion about the road outside our school, and for
years that was all anyone had. Every September a letter went home
asking parents to ‘take extra care’, every term someone had a near
miss, and every term the grown-ups sighed and said that somebody
5ought to do something.
Last spring my friend Callum was clipped by a van’s wing mirror on
his way in. He was fine, apart from a bruised elbow and a torn
blazer, but I was standing right behind him. That evening I decided
the somebody might as well be me.
10I didn’t storm anything. I am not a storming sort of person. I
started a petition, which felt about as revolutionary as signing a
birthday card, and I stood at the gates with a clipboard every
morning for three weeks. People were lovely. Parents signed, dinner
staff signed, a man walking his dog signed twice. By the end I had
15nine hundred names and a lot of people telling me what a brilliant
thing I was doing. The trouble with being told you are brilliant is
that it doesn’t change the road.
In June I took the petition to a council meeting. I had practised
my three minutes in front of the bathroom mirror until I could say
20‘pedestrian safety’ without my voice wobbling. The councillors
thanked me for my ‘passion’ and promised to ‘look into it’. Then
they moved on to bins.
Callum thought I was being far too polite. He wanted us to walk out
of lessons and stand in the road at home time with placards, so the
25local news would have to turn up. Part of me wanted to as well. But
I kept picturing a Year 7 stepping off the kerb in the middle of it
all, and I couldn’t agree.
So I did the boring things instead. I counted cars with a tally
chart for a fortnight. I emailed our councillor every month, so
30often that I’m fairly sure I became a nuisance. I got the primary
school down the road to write to him too.
In February a letter arrived. There will be a crossing next year,
it said, ‘subject to funding’.
I’d love to say I’ve proved that quiet campaigning works. Honestly,
35I don’t know. Maybe the emails did it. Maybe a protest would have
got the same answer in half the time. Maybe the crossing was always
coming. What I do know is that I’m not someone who waits for
somebody else any more. Whether that counts as winning, I’m still
working out.

Original passage.

Glossary

  • petition: a written request signed by many people
  • council meeting: a public meeting of the elected councillors who run the local area
  • pedestrian: a person walking rather than driving
  • placards: large signs carried in a protest
  • Year 7: the youngest pupils at secondary school, aged 11 or 12
  • tally chart: a way of counting by making a mark for each item
  • subject to funding: only if the money can be found

Read Text 2 again.

In this extract, the writer attempts to show the frustrations and rewards of campaigning quietly for change.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved.

Support your views with detailed reference to the text.

Question 5

15 marks

Text 2

In this blog post, a young researcher spending the winter at a scientific research station in Antarctica describes everyday life there. Temperatures are in degrees Celsius.

1Day seventy-four of the dark, and I have officially run out of ways
to describe the cold. This morning the screen by the kitchen door
said minus sixty-one, the lowest of the year so far. Everyone
crowded round to take a photo of it, as if it were a celebrity.
5People back home keep asking what an ordinary day looks like, so
here it is. My alarm goes at seven, but nobody needs it, because
Tomas, our chef, plays the same cheesy song through the kitchen
speaker every morning until we drag ourselves out of bed. Breakfast
is porridge. It is always porridge. Showers are limited to two
10minutes, because every drop of water here starts life as snow that
somebody has shovelled into the melter, and the rota for that job
is pinned to the wall in very large letters.
My job is looking after the weather instruments, which sounds cosy
until you remember that they live outside. Before I go out, I put
15on six layers, two pairs of gloves and a face mask, and the cold
still finds the one gap at my wrist. Last week the wind was so
strong that I had to walk to the mast bent almost double, and it
took me ten minutes to cover a distance I could normally run in
one. When I got back, the medic took one look at my cheek and said,
20‘Frostnip. Congratulations.’ Nobody tells you how much it stings
when it thaws.
The strangest thing is metal. I once grabbed the outside door
handle with a bare hand for about a second, and it felt exactly
like touching a hot pan. My skin has still not forgiven me.
25I won’t pretend I love it all the time. Some evenings the dark
presses in, and I sit in my tiny room scrolling through old photos
of green fields and feeling a very long way from my mum. The
internet is so slow that our video calls freeze on a frame of her
mid-sneeze. On those nights I go and find people. Friday is film
30night, there’s a quiz on Sundays, and on Wednesdays one of the
scientists gives a talk about their research, which is more fun
than it sounds.
And then, sometimes, the sky turns green. The aurora rolls overhead
in silent curtains, and the whole station stands outside, freezing,
35just staring up. The odd thing is that minus thirty now feels
almost mild. I never thought I would get used to this. I’m not sure
I have. But I’m still here.

Original passage.

Glossary

  • the dark: in the Antarctic winter the sun does not rise for months
  • melter: a machine that melts snow into water
  • rota: a list that shows whose turn it is to do a job
  • mast: a tall pole that carries weather instruments
  • frostnip: the first, mild stage of frostbite
  • aurora: the 'southern lights', bands of coloured light in the night sky

Read Text 2 again.

In this extract, the writer attempts to give an honest picture of what it is like to live through a winter in Antarctica.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved.

Support your views with detailed reference to the text.

Question 6

15 marks

Text 2

In this article for a school magazine, a Year 10 student describes a two-day practice expedition across the moors in bad weather.

1Everyone kept telling us the expedition would be
character-building. I can now confirm that my character has been
built, mostly out of mud.
The plan was simple: two days walking across the moors in groups of
5five, carrying everything we needed on our backs. Tent, stove,
sleeping bags, pasta and roughly a kilo of emergency jelly babies.
The forecast said ‘light showers’. The forecast lied. By ten
o’clock on the first morning the rain was coming at us sideways,
and the hill we were aiming for had vanished into a mist so thick
10that I could barely see Priya, who was holding the map three metres
in front of me.
That map, by the way, is the reason we walked an extra four
kilometres. We followed a stream we were certain was the right one,
chatting about what brilliant navigators we were, until we reached
15a farm that definitely should not have been there. Nobody shouted.
Nobody cried (much). We sat on a wall, shared the jelly babies and
turned round.
The low point came that afternoon. My boots were full of water, my
shoulders ached from the rucksack, and the last stretch to the
20campsite was a steep, muddy bank. Halfway down, Callum’s feet shot
out from under him and he slid the rest of the way on his backside,
yelling the whole time. Then, because it honestly looked quicker,
the rest of us did the same.
Cooking in the rain is a skill nobody teaches you. We crouched
25round the stove in the porch of the tent, two of us holding a coat
up to keep the wind off the flame, and ate pasta that was somehow
burnt and crunchy at the same time. It was the best meal of my
life. Someone started singing, badly, and we all joined in until a
teacher in the next field asked us to keep it down.
30I won’t pretend I slept. The tent dripped onto my sleeping bag all
night. But on the second afternoon, when we came over the last hill
and saw the minibus waiting in the car park, we started running,
packs bouncing, and high-fived as if we had won the cup final.
In a way, we had. To be fair, we were never in real danger: a
35teacher checked on us at every stage, and there was a phone in
every pocket. But I found out that I can keep going when I am cold,
wet and fed up, as long as the people around me are cold, wet and
fed up too. Would I do it again? Ask me when my socks have dried.

Original passage.

Glossary

  • character-building: developing good qualities such as determination and patience
  • moors: high, open, wild land, often boggy and windswept
  • navigators: people who find the way, using a map
  • porch: the covered area at the entrance of a tent

Read Text 2 again.

In this extract, the writer attempts to show that a difficult expedition can be both miserable and rewarding.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved.

Support your views with detailed reference to the text.

Question 7

15 marks

Text 2

In this blog post, a teenager describes a weekly trip to a bubble tea shop with two friends, and compares it with the way the writer's gran makes tea.

1Every Friday at ten past four, the three of us walk past the bus
stop, past the chip shop and into the bubble tea place by the
station. Nobody ever suggests it. We just go. It is less a plan
than a habit, like brushing your teeth, only sweeter.
5Ordering is the best part. You can’t just ask for ‘a tea’. First
you choose the tea itself (black, green, jasmine, or something
purple called taro that I still can’t explain), then the milk, then
the toppings, then the ice, and then, most importantly, the sugar,
which comes in percentages like a maths test. Priya always has a
10hundred per cent. She says anything less is ‘lying to yourself’.
Sam has twenty-five and looks at her as if she has committed a
crime. I sit in the middle at fifty, which I like to think shows
maturity but probably just shows that I can’t make decisions.
Then comes the ritual. The cup arrives sealed with a shiny plastic
15lid, tight as a drum, and you have to stab it with the fat straw in
one go. If you hesitate, the straw bends and everyone groans. If
you get it first time, there is a satisfying pop and a small round
of applause. Then the first sip, and the first chewy pearl of
tapioca shoots up the straw like a cannonball and hits the back of
20your throat. Every week we act surprised. Every week it happens
anyway.
My gran does not approve. She makes her tea in a brown teapot that
is older than my mum, warms the pot first, puts the milk in the cup
before the tea and will argue about this with anyone who stands
25still long enough. She calls my bubble tea ‘a pudding with a straw
in it’ and once asked whether you were supposed to chew it. (You
are, Gran. That’s the whole point.)
But I think we want the same thing. After a terrible week of mock
exams, Priya and Sam didn’t ask how they had gone. They just bought
30me a large one with extra pearls and let me moan for twenty
minutes. When Gran heard, she put the kettle on before I had even
taken my coat off.
So, honestly, I don’t think the tea matters that much. Pot or
plastic cup, milk first or last, a hundred per cent sugar or none
35at all. What matters is who is sitting across the table from you
while you drink it, and knowing they’ll be there again next Friday.

Original passage.

Glossary

  • bubble tea: a sweet, usually iced tea drink, often with milk, served with chewy balls of tapioca and a wide straw
  • taro: a root vegetable used to flavour some bubble tea; it turns the drink purple
  • tapioca: a starch made from the root of the cassava plant, here rolled into chewy balls ('pearls')
  • mock exams: practice exams taken in school before the real ones

Read Text 2 again.

In this extract, the writer attempts to show that who you share a drink with matters more than the drink itself.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved.

Support your views with detailed reference to the text.

Question 8

15 marks

Text 2

In this piece for a student magazine, a student looks back on her first week at a large, old sixth-form college.

1On my first morning at sixth form, I took a short cut and got told
off by a man on a ride-on mower.
In fairness, the field was enormous, and the path went the long way
round, past the old building with the clock tower that is on the
5front of every prospectus. I was late, my new shoes were rubbing,
and I had a timetable I couldn’t read. So I cut across the grass.
Halfway over, the mower stopped and the man driving it pointed at a
little sign I hadn’t noticed: ‘Please keep off the grass’. He didn’t
shout. He didn’t need to. I went back to the path with my face
10burning, sure that everyone at every window had seen.
That was how the whole first week felt. I came from a school where
hardly anyone stayed on after Year 11. Here, people had older
brothers and sisters who had been here before them, and parents who
said ‘when I was at college’. They knew which staircase led to which
15classroom. They called the teachers by their first names without
blushing. I kept waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and
explain that there had been a mistake with my letter.
On Thursday, I thought it had happened. I went to the library in a
free period (a proper library, with a balcony, green lamps and the
20smell of old paper) and the woman at the desk stopped me at the
gate. ‘Lanyard?’ she said. I didn’t have one. I’d left it on the
kitchen table. I was already turning round when she said, ‘Hang on,’
wrote my name on a visitor sticker and pressed it on to my jumper
herself. ‘There. Now you’re official. The comfy chairs are upstairs,
25and nobody ever sits by the window, which is a crime.’
I sat by the window for an hour. I didn’t do much work. Mostly I
looked down at the field, at the long path and the short cut, and
thought about how small that moment on the grass had been, and how
big I had let it become.
30It’s March now. I have a lanyard I never forget, a favourite chair,
and two friends who were also told off by the mower man in their
first week. (He does it to everyone. He told me in the lunch queue
that his name is Dev and that the grass had been reseeded in August,
which is why he was ‘a bit protective’.) I still take the long way
35round. But I walk it now as if I’m meant to be there, because I am.

Original passage.

Glossary

  • prospectus: a booklet advertising a school or college to new students
  • free period: a lesson-time gap in a student’s timetable, for private study
  • lanyard: a cord worn round the neck that holds an ID card
  • reseeded: sown with new grass seed

Read Text 2 again.

In this extract, the writer attempts to show that feeling like an outsider in a new place of learning does not have to last.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved.

Support your views with detailed reference to the text.