2024 CCEA GCSE English Language 5030 模擬試題連答案詳解

Your school's Board of Governors is considering the following statement:

'Mobile phones should be completely banned from school premises, not just switched off during lessons.'

Write an article for your school newsletter, to be read by both students and parents, giving your own point of view on this statement. You should try to persuade your readers to agree with you.

(Content, Audience and Organisation: 57 marks. Spend about 30 minutes writing, after 15 minutes' planning.)

Technical Accuracy (30 marks) is assessed on the SAME article you wrote in response to the previous task (the mobile-phone-ban article for your school newsletter). Marks are awarded for the accuracy and range of your sentence structures, spelling, punctuation and grammar, not for content. (See the model article given as the solution to the previous task; the notes below assess its technical accuracy as an example of a high-scoring response.)

Read the text below, in which the writer describes the growing popularity of wild swimming.

The Cold Water Revolution

[Paragraph 1] It is six in the morning, the air is barely above freezing, and a queue of people in woolly hats is winding down to the edge of the lake. This is not a punishment; it is a growing national obsession. Wild swimming — plunging into rivers, lakes and the open sea, whatever the season — has surged in popularity over the past five years, and the reasons go far beyond a love of getting wet. Regular cold-water swimmers report measurable physical benefits: studies suggest that repeated cold exposure can improve circulation, strengthen the immune system, and even reduce chronic pain, as the initial shock trains the body to respond more calmly to stress over time.

[Paragraph 2] But talk to swimmers at the water's edge and the physical benefits are rarely the first thing they mention. What they describe, again and again, is community. 'I didn't come for my circulation,' laughs Maria Osei, a 34-year-old teacher who has swum three mornings a week for two years, 'I came because a friend dragged me along once, and now this is the only hour of my day that's completely mine.' Swimming groups have become unlikely support networks — spaces where a shared, slightly ridiculous discomfort dissolves the usual social barriers, and where people who might never otherwise meet end up swapping stories, and phone numbers, shoulder to shoulder in the shallows.

[Paragraph 3] Of course, cold water is not without risk, and every regular swimmer will tell a beginner the same thing: know your limits, never swim alone, and respect a river or a sea that owes you nothing. But for those who take the plunge sensibly, it seems the cold has an odd sort of warmth to offer after all.

Explain how the writer has used language to engage the reader's interest in wild swimming. Support your comments with evidence from the text.
(21 marks)

Re-read the text above about wild swimming.

In your own words, write down two benefits of wild swimming described in the text: one from paragraph 1, and one from paragraph 2. For each benefit, present two pieces of supporting evidence from the text.

(a) Benefit from paragraph 1: [4]
(b) Two pieces of supporting evidence for this benefit: [2]
(c) Benefit from paragraph 2: [4]
(d) Two pieces of supporting evidence for this benefit: [2]

Read the media text below, a promotional webpage for a company offering beginner wild-swimming sessions.

[MASTHEAD, large bold display font across the top of the page]: SplashOut Adventures
[Sub-heading directly beneath, italic]: Open-water experiences for complete beginners

[HEADLINE, huge bold sans-serif font, centred]: DIVE INTO SOMETHING NEW THIS SPRING

[Full-width photo caption, describing an image of swimmers laughing in a lake at sunrise]: (Photo: our Saturday group, five minutes after their first cold dip — and still smiling.)

[Body text, standard column width]: You don't need a wetsuit, a personal best, or even confidence — just a swimming costume, a sense of humour, and twenty minutes to spare. Our beginner Wild Swim Mornings run every Saturday from March to October at three stunning lakeside locations, with a qualified safety cover team in the water at all times.

[Shaded pull-quote box, large italic text, set apart from body text]: "I went once as a dare. Eighteen months later I've swum through an entire winter." — Danny, first-time swimmer turned regular

[Sub-heading, bold, smaller than main headline]: WHAT'S INCLUDED
[Bulleted list with tick-mark icons]:
• A fully qualified open-water safety instructor
• Wetsuit and tow-float hire, if you need it
• Hot chocolate and towels waiting at the water's edge
• A certificate for your very first wild swim

[Sub-heading, bold]: PRICES
[Text in a bordered box, contrasting background]: Single session: £18. Six-week beginner course: £90 (saving £18). Under-18s: half price, accompanied by a paying adult.

[Bottom banner, bold text on a bright background, running the full width of the page]: BOOK YOUR FIRST SPLASH TODAY — spaces fill fast!
[Small print beneath banner]: www.splashoutadventures.example | Follow us @splashoutadventures

Explain how the writer has used language to make this webpage appealing and persuasive to a reader considering trying wild swimming for the first time. Support your comments with evidence from the text.
(20 marks)

Re-read the webpage above.

Select two examples of presentational features used in this webpage to make it appealing to the reader. Explain the intended effect of each of the two presentational features you have chosen.

(a) First presentational feature: [1] Explanation of effect: [4]
(b) Second presentational feature: [1] Explanation of effect: [4]

EITHER
(a) Personal writing: Write a personal essay for the examiner about a time when you had to be brave.
OR
(b) Creative writing: Write a story for publication in a school anthology. The scene described below is to be the basis for your creative writing. You may provide your own title.

Scene: An empty platform at a small train station, late at night. A single suitcase sits abandoned on a bench under a flickering light. In the distance, a train approaches.

(Content and Organisation: 58 marks. Spend about 30 minutes writing, after 15 minutes' planning. A full model response to option (a), Personal Writing, is given as the solution.)

Technical Accuracy (30 marks) is assessed on the SAME piece of writing you produced in response to the previous task (either the personal essay or the story). Marks are awarded for the accuracy and range of your sentence structures, spelling, punctuation and grammar, not for content. (See the model personal essay given as the solution to the previous task; the notes below assess its technical accuracy as an example of a high-scoring response.)

Read the two extracts below, printed on the separate insert. Text A is from a novel about a girl's first day at a new school. Text B is from a novel about an elderly woman living alone since her husband's death.

Text A

The corridor smelled of floor polish and somewhere-else, of a school that had never been mine and probably never would be. I had practised my name in my head all morning — Isla, just Isla, nothing complicated — but when the teacher said it out loud to a room of thirty unfamiliar faces, it came out sounding like someone else's name entirely.

'You can sit there,' she said, pointing to an empty chair beside a girl with a friendship bracelet on each wrist, stacked like tiny, colourful armour. I sat. The girl did not look up from her book.

At lunch, I found a table at the very edge of the hall, close enough to the wall that I could pretend I had chosen it for the view. I ate my sandwich in the particular, careful way you eat when you are trying to make an ordinary task last exactly as long as the silence around you. Two tables away, laughter rose and fell like something with a tide, something I was not close enough to be pulled in by.

By the final bell, I had said four words aloud all day, not counting the register. I walked home the long way, past the shop with the broken sign, past the park with the swings nobody used after dark, turning the day over and over like a stone in my pocket, looking for the smooth side. I did not find it. But I put the day away anyway, folded small, and told myself that tomorrow the corridor might, just possibly, smell a little more like mine.

Text B

Edith had grown used to the particular silence of a house built for two. It settled into the rooms differently depending on the hour: brisk and businesslike in the mornings, when the radio filled the kitchen with other people's voices; heavier by evening, when the radio was switched off and the only sound left was the tick of the clock Harold had wound every night for forty-one years, and which she now wound herself, out of habit rather than necessity, as though the house might otherwise notice the difference.

She had not moved his chair. It sat opposite hers at an angle that suited nobody now, catching the last of the evening light in a way that made the room look, for a moment each day, exactly as it used to. She told herself this was practical — there was nowhere else, after all, for a second armchair to go — though she suspected, somewhere beneath the practicality, that she was not quite ready for the room to stop expecting him.

Her daughter rang on Sundays, always at six, always for exactly the right amount of time to satisfy duty without quite reaching comfort. 'Are you managing all right, Mum?' The question arrived weekly, wrapped in genuine concern and entirely the wrong shape for an honest answer. 'Managing fine,' Edith would say, and it was not precisely a lie — she was managing, in the way a boat manages a slow leak, bailing quietly, competently, and entirely alone.

Compare and contrast how the writers have presented feelings of isolation in the two extracts. Present supporting evidence from both texts.
(32 marks)

Read the non-fiction text below.

Is It Time to Rethink Homework?

Ask any group of secondary school students what they would change about school life, and homework will appear somewhere near the top of nearly every list. It is easy to dismiss this as simple teenage complaint — of course they would rather not do extra work — but a growing number of educators and researchers are asking a more serious question: does homework, as currently set, actually achieve what it claims to?

The case for homework is a familiar one. Practice consolidates learning; a maths problem set the evening after a lesson reinforces a method while it is still fresh. Homework also builds independence, requiring students to organise their own time and work without a teacher standing over their shoulder — a skill that will matter long after any individual worksheet is forgotten. For subjects like languages, where consistent, spaced practice genuinely improves retention, regular homework has real evidence behind it.

And yet the counter-evidence is harder to dismiss than it once was. Several large-scale studies have found only a weak link between the sheer quantity of homework set and improved academic outcomes, particularly once students reach an age where evening hours are already competing with part-time jobs, caring responsibilities, or simply the sleep that adolescent brains urgently need. Critics point out that homework can also widen, rather than close, inequality: a student with a quiet bedroom, a reliable internet connection and a parent free to help is simply better placed to complete it well than a student without any of those things, however hard they try.

Perhaps the most persuasive middle ground comes from schools that have not abolished homework, but reformed it — replacing lengthy, repetitive worksheets with shorter, more purposeful tasks: a single well-chosen problem rather than twenty similar ones, or independent reading rather than a worksheet about independent reading. Early results from these schools are promising, suggesting that the debate may be less about whether homework should exist, and more about whether what we currently call homework is actually doing its job.

There is no simple answer here, and perhaps that is the point. What seems clear is that homework deserves more careful thought than either its defenders or its critics often give it — not scrapped wholesale, and not left unquestioned either, but redesigned with genuine evidence, and genuine students, in mind.

Explain how the writer's opening paragraph engages the reader's interest in the debate about homework. Support your comments with evidence from the text.
(15 marks)

Re-read the text above about homework.

Explain how the writer presents a balanced range of viewpoints in the final two paragraphs of the text. Support your comments with evidence from the text.
(15 marks)