Read Text C, The Night Road Across the Salar, and then answer Questions 2(a) to 2(d). (a) Identify a word or phrase from the text which suggests the same id...

Question 2 tests four different skills in ascending order of difficulty: finding the writer's exact wording, inferring meaning from context, explaining how a single example conveys feeling, and sustained analysis of language. Each part demands a different kind of answer, and the commonest error is to give the wrong kind.

2(a) Finding the writer's own words [4]

Here the exact wording of the text is required. You are not being asked to explain or reword anything; you are being asked to hunt down the phrase the writer already used for that idea. An answer that paraphrases scores nothing, however accurate the paraphrase.

The method is always the same: take the underlined phrase, decide which single idea in it is most unusual, and search for the sentence in the passage that carries that idea. Copy the words exactly and no more than the words needed; adding surrounding text can spoil the answer if it includes a different idea.

2(b) Explaining the writer's word choices [3]

This part is the opposite of (a): here you must produce your own words, and a dictionary definition alone will not do. Each word is being used figuratively, so explain what the word means in this context, including what its literal sense brings with it.

1. leak [1]: the light seeped in slowly and without any clear beginning, escaping into the sky little by little in the way a liquid escapes through a small crack, rather than arriving all at once. The context supplies the contrast: 'Dawn did not break so much as leak'. 'Break' is the ordinary word for sunrise and implies a sudden event, so 'leak' is chosen precisely because it denies that suddenness, and it also carries a faint sense of something unwanted and uncontrolled.
2. bruised [1]: a dark purplish colour with a faintly damaged look, like the mark left on skin after a blow, which also suggests something tender or sore. Do not stop at 'purple'. The point of the word is that the sky looks injured, and the sequence 'The black went to grey, the grey went to a pale bruised violet' shows the colour arriving slowly, like a bruise coming up.
3. milk [1]: the water lost its hard, black, glassy look and turned pale, soft and cloudy, so that light no longer passed through it or bounced off it but seemed to sit in it. The context makes the change explicit: the water 'turned from black glass to milk', so 'milk' is defined against 'glass'. Glass is transparent, hard and reflective; milk is opaque, soft and matt. That contrast, not the whiteness alone, is what earns the mark.

2(c) How the writer suggests his feelings [3]

One example, fully explained, is worth all three marks. The marks are for the explanation of feeling, not for the length of the quotation, so choose a short phrase and take it apart. A model answer:

The writer says the silence was 'a great flat hand pressed over the whole world'. The metaphor gives silence a body and a force, so he no longer experiences it as the absence of noise but as something physically bearing down on him, which conveys how oppressed and trapped he feels. 'Pressed' suggests steady, unresisted weight, as though he cannot move under it, and the scale of 'the whole world' shows that there is nowhere outside the sensation to escape to, so the feeling is one of being completely overwhelmed. 'Flat' also echoes the landscape itself, which suggests that the place and the feeling have become the same thing.

Other examples that could equally earn the marks:

• 'my ears hunted through it for something to hold': 'hunted' suggests an anxious, almost desperate search, and 'something to hold' shows that he feels unsteady and needs an anchor, which points to fear or vertigo.
• 'then my own blood, then nothing': the shortening list narrows to emptiness, so the reader shares his sense of everything falling away until only he is left.
• 'I had thought silence was an absence. It is not.': the flat correction in a very short sentence conveys shock, as though the experience has overturned something he had been sure of.

Notice what the model answer does with three marks: it identifies the technique, it explains the specific feeling created, and it comments on individual words within the quotation. An answer that only says 'this shows he felt scared' identifies a feeling without showing how the language produces it and would not reach the top of the range.

2(d) Language analysis in paragraphs 5 and 8 [15]

You must take three examples from each named paragraph and include imagery. Paragraph 5 is about the flooded salt turning into a reflection of the night sky; paragraph 8 is about the silence and cold when the engine stops. Name the technique, say exactly what is compared with what, and then say what the comparison adds that plain statement would not.

Model response (about 290 words):

In paragraph 5 the writer dissolves the ground beneath the truck. The metaphor 'it took the sky and laid it down under our wheels' gives the salt deliberate agency: 'laid it down' is a careful, almost tender action, so the flat seems to arrange the scene rather than simply reflect it, and the reader is unsettled by a landscape that acts. The balanced repetition of 'stars above the windscreen and stars beneath the tyres' mirrors in its own symmetry the doubling it reports, so the sentence enacts the confusion it describes and the reader loses any sense of up and down along with the writer. The simile 'like a lamp swinging on a wire' then removes the ground completely: 'hung' and 'swinging' suggest weightlessness and a slight instability, and a single lamp in a great darkness reduces the truck to a speck. Between these, the short declarative 'We were not driving across a plain.' interrupts the long flowing sentence and forces a reassessment of everything just read.

Paragraph 8 performs the reverse move, converting absence into presence. 'It came at us across the flat with weight in it' personifies silence as something advancing and faintly threatening, and 'weight' turns nothing at all into a force capable of pressing. The metaphor 'a great flat hand pressed over the whole world' is suffocating in scale, while 'flat' echoes the salar itself so that place and silence become one thing. 'My ears hunted through it for something to hold' personifies the ears as a frightened animal searching, and 'to hold' betrays the need for an anchor where there is no landmark. The diminishing list 'the tick of the cooling engine, then my own blood, then nothing' narrows inward until the rhythm stops, before the homely simile 'like putting down a heavy bag' resolves fear into relief.

Further material available in paragraph 5: 'no deeper than a coat of varnish' makes the water sound thin, hard and glossy, and 'coat' suggests something applied to a surface, which prepares for the mirror image that follows; 'The horizon had been rubbed out with a thumb' turns the landscape into a drawing that someone has casually erased, and 'thumb' makes the erasure careless and human-scaled, which is unsettling; 'Don Efrain steered into all that emptiness with one wrist on the wheel and never once looked up' is deliberately unimpressed detail set against the wonder around it, and 'one wrist' conveys total ease.

Further material available in paragraph 8: 'as though the ground were drawing the heat out of me on purpose' personifies the salt as deliberate and faintly hostile, so the cold feels like an act rather than a condition; 'crowded, shoulder to shoulder ... they seemed to lean down over the truck to see what had stopped it' turns the stars into a curious human crowd, which is both companionable and slightly oppressive and makes the vast sky feel close.

Level descriptors [15]

• Level 6 (13 to 15): Wide-ranging and precise selection from both paragraphs. The candidate explains the effect of individual words as well as of whole images, shows how images work, meaning what is compared with what and what that comparison adds, and traces how the writer's choices build an overall impression. Analysis is sustained and never merely descriptive.
• Level 5 (10 to 12): Good selection from both paragraphs, including imagery. Clear explanation of effect for most choices, with some close attention to individual words. Occasional explanation is thinner than the rest.
• Level 4 (7 to 9): Reasonable selection, but the paragraphs may be unevenly covered. Effects are explained in general terms, for example 'this makes it sound cold', rather than analysed. Some identification without comment.
• Level 3 (5 to 6): A few appropriate choices, mostly explained by paraphrase. Imagery may be named but not unpicked.
• Level 2 (3 to 4): Choices are made but comment is minimal, repetitive or inaccurate. Long quotation with little of the candidate's own writing.
• Level 1 (1 to 2): Very limited selection, with little or no comment on language.
• 0 marks: No creditable response.

Two restrictions decide many marks. A candidate who writes about only one of the two named paragraphs cannot be placed above Level 4, however good the analysis. A candidate who chooses fewer than three examples from each paragraph is likely to be limited by the range of the material, because the higher levels require breadth as well as depth. The other frequent loss is paraphrase disguised as analysis: writing that 'the truck hung like a lamp shows it was hanging like a lamp' repeats the image instead of explaining why a lamp on a wire is the right thing to compare a truck to.