GCSE English and English Literature Examinations GCSE English There are TWO examinations in English. You will sit the papers on different days, and you need to be aware of the different demands they make on you.
Paper 1: ( Unit 2431) Non-Fiction and Media Texts
[1 hour 45 minutes]
Section A: a test of reading skills Question 1: the selective summary
[30 minutes]
You will be given an extract from a work of non-fiction (an autobiography, or something of that sort). The question will ask you to extract from the passage some specific information. If the question says, as it does in June 2008 paper (where the passage was a chunk from Bob Dylan’s autobiography): “Summarise in your own words what the writer’s feelings were towards fame and his private life” you should read through the passage, underlining or highlighting, only those phrases and sentences that relate to the two prompts in the question, those dealing with fame and with the writer’s feelings about his private life. It may be that most of the passage deals with these two ideas to varying degrees, so you should try to highlight the most significant points. Use your intelligence to identify the most important ideas. This is a skill the exam is designed to test. Spend up to 5 minutes doing this. Now you need to show that you can organise this information into meaningful groups. Each group of ideas should be clustered together as a paragraph in your summary. It may be that the writer mentions ideas at the beginning and at the end of the passage that you think belong together. If this is the case, it’s actually desirable that you group them together within a paragraph of your own, because it shows that you’ve organised the information. Always be governed by coherence in this: a paragraph is a group of sentences relating to one central idea.