How to Answer Question 2 (Edexcel GCSE English Language)

Question 2 on Paper 1 of your Edexcel GCSE English Language exam is another quick search and find question.

The following guide to how to answer Question 2 includes:

• Question 2 overview

• How to answer Question 2

• Exam tips

Question 2 overview

Question 2 follows on from Question 1 by asking you to focus on a slightly longer section of text, still taken from an early section of the reading passage. The question will ask you to give “two things” or “two ways” identified from the text, and you should give two separate answers, following the layout of the question paper.

It is again important that you only take your answers from the lines specified in the question. You are able to use your own words to answer this question, or select two appropriate quotations from the lines of text.

As this question is only worth 2 marks, you should again spend no more than 5 minutes on it (including reading time).

How to answer Question 2

Let’s look at Question 2 from the June 2023 exam:

Remember, the style of this question is always the same, but it is still important to read the question carefully and highlight what the focus of the question is.

In order to achieve 2 marks for this question, you should:

1. Read the question carefully and highlight its focus (what you are being asked to find a word or phrase about)

2. Scan the lines and highlight the words or phrases that answer the question

For example:

The question asks you to identify two things which show how deserted the place is. Therefore, any two of the following would achieve 1 mark each:

• The street is “desolate”

• The shutters are all closed

• The only living creatures are chickens or the “cock and his hens”

• They “find no one to welcome us”

• The narrator has to assist his wife to dismount as there is no one else to help her

• “No human creature to answer when I call”

• There is nobody there to take the horses

You can write your answers in your own words, or as a direct quotation from the text, as long as what you write answers the question.

Here is another example:

After highlighting the focus of this question — what the reader learns about the weather that night — we can now look at lines 8–11 of the text to find the answer:

Here we can see that there are several references to the weather, so any two of the following answers would gain marks:

• There is fog/it is foggy

• The fog is heavier than it had been earlier in the night

• The atmosphere was damp

• “No rain fell”

• It is cold as Oliver’s hair and eyebrows started to freeze

• There is “half-frozen moisture” in the air

Importantly, candidates who wrote “it was intensely dark” did not receive a mark, as “dark” does not specifically describe the weather.

Exam tips

• If you have already given the answer in your own words, there is no need to find a quotation from the text to support this as you will have already achieved the mark

• Read the question carefully to ensure your selections answer the focus of the question

• Write your two answers separately