Free·GCSE English Language
Free GCSE English Language Questions and Answers
12 questions, one from each topic, with the answer that takes every mark and what it is worth. Nothing to sign up to and nothing to download — they are on this page.
Finding and interpreting information, Analysing language, Analysing structure, Comparing writers’ perspectives, Evaluating a text critically, Evaluating a text critically · the question, Descriptive writing, Narrative writing, Writing to argue or persuade, Writing to explain, inform and advise and Sentence craft and technical accuracy
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We came down into the valley at four o’clock, and I confess my first feeling was disappointment. I had been promised grandeur. What I found was a town the colour of the rock it had been cut from, sitting in the bend of a river the colour of tea, and above it a sky that had been grey since Tuesday. My companion pronounced it charming. I said nothing, and thought about the hotel.
You come out of the station and the heat hits you first, then the noise, and then — a second later, once your eyes have adjusted — the colour. Everything here has been painted at least twice. The bus that brought me in from the airport was pink. I had read about the cathedral for a year and I did not look at it for two days, because there was too much going on at eye level.
Synthesise what both texts tell you about how the writers felt on arriving.
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The full-mark answer · 8 marks · 4 + 4
Both writers arrive carrying an expectation and both have it overturned, though in opposite directions. The first had been promised grandeur and finds a town that offers him nothing, so his disappointment is really the distance between a promise and a valley. The second had read about the cathedral for a year and then does not look at it for two days — also a plan overturned, but by abundance rather than by absence. Neither writer is describing a place so much as describing having been wrong about one.
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I had said it was two hours. It had been closer to five, and for most of the last one the road had no signs on it at all, which I did not mention when I finally called.
The cottage was where the letter said it would be. I want to be clear that I was not frightened. I checked the back seat before I got out, because that is a sensible thing to do. I left the headlights on because the porch had no bulb in it. I stood for a moment with my hand on the car door because my leg had gone to sleep on the drive.
There was a note taped to the door. It was not addressed to me.
Explain how you can tell the narrator is not being entirely honest.
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The full-mark answer · 6 marks · 3 + 3
Two things give the narrator away and only one is a lie. The journey is the plain case: two hours claimed against five taken, with the missing signs left out of the phone call. The stronger evidence is the sentence nobody asked for — I want to be clear that I was not frightened — which answers an accusation that has not been made. Everything after it is then supplied with a reason: the back seat, the headlights, the dead leg. Three innocent explanations in a row is one more than an honest account needs.
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The gates opened at ten past and the crowd drained through them — not all at once, but faster at the centre than at the edges, turning slightly as it went, the way water goes down a plughole. Someone’s hat came off. Nobody bent to pick it up. By the time I reached the turnstile the hat had been walked into the shape of the ground beneath it.
Define the term simile, and give one example from the extract.
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The full-mark answer · 2 marks · 1 + 1
A simile compares one thing to another using like or as. Here the writer uses the construction that does the same job: the crowd moves ‘the way water goes down a plughole’.
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Define what a reading question means by the word structure.
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The full-mark answer · 2 marks · 1 + 1
Structure is the order in which a writer gives the reader information, and where they choose to move the reader’s attention. It concerns sequence and focus rather than paragraphing or sentence length in themselves.
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Identify one similarity in the two writers’ attitudes to the city.
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The full-mark answer · 2 marks
Both writers stay in spite of it. Each admits the city is hard to bear — one calls it so loud and so indifferent, the other says the noise never stops — and each then refuses to be pitied for being there.
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They had moved her bed under the window in March, while it was still possible to believe she would want to see out of it.
The room had been yellow once. Now the walls were the colour of weak tea near the ceiling and something greyer lower down where the damp had got in, and the curtains — which had been yellow too — had faded to almost nothing on the side the sun reached.
I looked at her hands on the blanket. Still there. I looked at the glass on the table, half full, the tablets beside it in their paper cup. Still there. I looked at the chair by the door where somebody was supposed to be sitting, and at the coat over the back of it. Still there.
The doctor used a lot of words. Comfortable. Manageable. Stable. None of them meant what they usually mean.
Identify one method that makes the account believable.
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The full-mark answer · 2 marks
The writer includes detail that is no use to the account — the walls had been yellow once — which is how memory behaves rather than how a story behaves.
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Tom was eleven and had worked out that if he stood at the end of the corridor by the radiator, he could hear which way the argument was going without being seen from either doorway. He had worked this out some time ago. He had a place for his bag.
Tonight it was the quiet kind, which was worse. The quiet kind went on longer and there was no way of telling when it had finished.
At half past nine he made two rounds of toast, because somebody would want them later and because it gave him a reason to be in the kitchen. He put them on a plate and he put the plate in the middle of the table, where either of them could reach it without having to be the one who asked.
‘The writer makes the reader want the boy to run.’ Evaluate this statement.
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Define the difference between describing and narrating.
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The full-mark answer · 2 marks
Narrating moves time forward; describing holds it still. A description may contain things happening, but each one is there to reveal the place rather than to change it.
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Define what is meant by narrative voice.
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The full-mark answer · 2 marks
Narrative voice is what the telling gives away about the teller: not who is speaking, but what their choices reveal — what they mention, what they leave out, what they call things.
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Define the difference between arguing and persuading.
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The full-mark answer · 2 marks
An argument sets out a case and expects to be examined; persuasion aims at a decision and will use whatever moves it. One is judged on whether it holds together, the other on whether it works.
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Define the difference between explaining and informing.
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The full-mark answer · 2 marks
Informing says what is the case; explaining says why. An explanation therefore has to know what the reader already believes, and information does not.
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The rain had stopped, we went outside anyway.
Identify the error in this sentence.
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The full-mark answer · 1 mark
A comma splice — two main clauses joined by a comma.
What the book adds
These are the answers that score everything. GCSE English Language Questions & Answers is the other half: the same questions answered weakly, middlingly and strongly, the mark each version scores, what separates them, and the mark scheme behind it — a hundred questions across every topic, written for the teacher marking them rather than the pupil sitting them.