Read Text C, The Night Shift, in the insert and then answer Question 2 (a) to (d) on this question paper. (a) Identify a word or phrase from the text which ...

Question 2 carries 25 marks: (a) four items at 1 mark, (b) three items at 1 mark, (c) 3 marks, (d) 15 marks. Parts (a) and (b) look alike and test opposite skills, so settle which direction you are traveling in before you write a word.

Part (a): find the writer's own wording [4 x 1 = 4]

The underlined words in the question are the examiner's paraphrase. They are deliberately not in Text C. Your task is to go to the named paragraph and quote the wording the writer actually used for that idea. Re-expressing the idea in your own words scores nothing here, because the skill being tested is location, not vocabulary.

How this part is marked. Credit the required core word or phrase whenever it is present and identifiable as the candidate's selection. Words surrounding it are neither required nor penalized, which is why each accepted answer below prints its optional context in brackets, the convention used in the published schemes. What is not creditable is an indiscriminate lift of a long stretch of text that fails to select anything.

Length is not what is judged; selection is. A quotation that runs a little longer than necessary still earns the mark, but an entire paragraph copied out in the hope that the answer lies somewhere inside it selects nothing and earns none.

Part (b): meanings in your own words [3 x 1 = 3]

The direction now reverses. These three words are in the text, and you must re-express each one as it is used in this sentence about what arrives at the intake desk at two in the morning. Repeating the word, or offering another grammatical form of it, earns nothing.

• dazed: stunned and confused, only half aware of what is happening, as though concussed. The pigeons are not calm, they are too disoriented to react. [1]
• compliant: unresisting, willing to be handled, putting up no fight at all. The word explains why a pigeon is easy work, and it is placed there to set up the contrast with the turtle that follows, which is "ancient and furious". [1]
• scored: marked with scratches, cut across with lines or grooves worn into the surface. The comparison "like an old dinner plate" is your check: a plate gets those marks through years of knife-work, so "scored" means scratched by long wear, not stained or patterned. [1]

Part (c): one example, Marisol's feelings at the end of the night [3]

One example, properly opened up, not three quotations listed. The three marks are awarded for: selecting an apt example and quoting or clearly indicating it [1]; explaining accurately what the words mean [1]; giving a convincing account of the feeling they convey [1]. The explanation must be in your own words. A candidate who quotes several phrases and unpacks none of them cannot get past the first mark. The whole extract is the narrator's own reflection, so every phrase in it speaks about her feelings directly.

A full-mark response: The repeated "Not because" sets up two explanations and then rejects both. Sadness and failure are exactly the feelings anyone would expect after a night like this, and by naming them and pushing them aside the narrator shows that she has already argued the whole thing out with herself and found the obvious answers inadequate. What survives that argument is the coyote's calculating look, so the feeling conveyed is not grief but a lasting unease: she has been measured by a wild animal and found dangerous, and she cannot put the memory down. [3]

Other examples that reach the same standard, each worth the full three if opened up in the same way: "every week since" (the memory returns without being invited, so this is not a choice she is making); "the center is full of sad" (a flat, rationed phrase showing how carefully she now guards her own pity, and how suspicious she is of easy emotion); "although we did" (an unprotected admission of failure that she refuses to soften); "It is the arithmetic" (a short, blunt sentence that isolates the one detail she cannot dismiss, and picks up the "terrible arithmetic" of the animal's stare).

Part (d): language in paragraph 5 and paragraph 6 [15]

This is analysis, not retelling. Three choices are required from each paragraph and imagery must be among them, so a brilliant answer on the drive alone cannot reach the top range. For each choice, work in three steps: what the words literally say, what they make the reader see or feel, and why that word was chosen instead of the plain alternative.

Paragraph 5, the drive north up Elston:

• "a different country": a metaphor that reclassifies streets the narrator drives through in daylight as foreign territory. It tells the reader that the ordinary rules are suspended for the next few hours and prepares us for everything strange that follows.
• "in long silver stitches, as though the night were being sewn shut ahead of us": the central image of the paragraph. Sleet in headlights really does fall in long bright lines, and the sewing comparison turns the darkness into cloth being closed over the van, so the two of them seem to be driving into something that is being sealed behind them. "Silver" lends a hard, cold prettiness to what is in fact miserable weather.
• "like blown dandelion heads": a simile for streetlights seen through wet air. It blurs each light into a soft ball and adds fragility, since a blown dandelion is one breath away from scattering, which quietly matches the fragile night ahead.
• "talked patiently to nobody at all": personification of the traffic signals. Machinery goes on performing for an audience that has gone home, which makes the empty city seem lonely and faintly absurd. "Patiently" is the choice worth commenting on, because patience implies someone waiting to be obeyed.

Paragraph 6, finding the coyote:

• "so completely camouflaged by the litter around it that for a few seconds I could not distinguish it from the trash": a living animal is momentarily indistinguishable from garbage, which measures both how nearly it was missed and how little the city has left for it.
• "a narrow, hungry geometry of a thing": the strongest image here. Reducing the coyote to lines and angles strips away all warmth and sentimentality, "hungry" makes even its shape look starved, and "of a thing" withholds the dignity of a name.
• "its coat the color of wet cardboard": the comparison keeps the animal inside the vocabulary of discarded waste begun by "litter" and "trash", so the paragraph builds one cumulative impression rather than a series of separate pictures.
• "a kind of terrible arithmetic": a metaphor that gives the animal calculation rather than instinct. It is watching, counting, working out what the humans are worth to it, and an intelligence like that is far more unsettling than a snarl would be. The phrase is also what the last paragraph returns to.
• "The sleet hissed on the water": sibilance, the repeated s sounds imitating the noise itself, holding the moment in an eerie hush that the radio "still playing to itself" in an empty shop makes stranger.

The overview that lifts an answer into the top range is the relationship between the two paragraphs: paragraph 5 makes the city unreal and closes it in behind the van, and paragraph 6 then puts a thinking, judging animal at the center of that sealed space, so the writer has turned a rescue call into an encounter.

Mark ranges for (d):

• 13 to 15: six or more well-selected examples spread evenly across both paragraphs, at least two of them images, each explained precisely; literal sense separated from effect; connotation explored; a clear sense of how the choices build one impression.
• 10 to 12: three or more apt examples from each paragraph including imagery, with clear explanation of most; some comments reach effect, others stop at meaning.
• 7 to 9: suitable examples but general comment ("this makes it more interesting"), or effect asserted rather than shown; imagery named without being analyzed; one paragraph thinly covered.
• 4 to 6: a few relevant choices, largely paraphrased; some "examples" are plot points rather than language choices.
• 1 to 3: isolated quotation with little or no comment, or retelling of the events.
• 0: nothing creditworthy.

An answer far outside 200 to 300 words is not penalized directly, but a very short one has no room to earn the top range and a very long one usually drifts into narrative.

Exam takeaway: in (a) select, do not copy; in (b) replace, do not repeat; in (d) never write that a phrase "makes it more descriptive". Name what the word literally means, then what it makes you see, and the mark follows.