## Insert

The two sources that follow are:

- Source A: 21st-century non-fiction
- The Night the Battery Died by Leah Morton

An extract from a Memoir first published in 2022.

- Source B: 19th-century non-fiction
- A Winter Ramble and a Missing Way by Edmund Clarke

An extract from a Travel writing first published in 1874.

### Source A

Source A is an extract from a Memoir in which a teenager describes getting lost on a winter hike and learning how fear, darkness and small choices shape survival.

> 1 I told Mum it was “just a quick walk”. I even said it with that casual voice that means, please don’t ask questions, because if you ask questions I might have to admit I haven’t really thought it through. The plan was simple: catch the bus to the edge of the moor, follow the marked trail to the old stone circle, take a few photos for my geography project, then be back in town in
>
> 6 time for chips. I was halfway to the stone circle when the first thing went wrong, and it was so small I didn’t even call it wrong. A message popped up: 10% battery. I glanced at the screen, frowned, and turned the brightness down. I didn’t panic because I had a map, I had a phone, I had those things that make you feel protected. I had grown up with a blue dot that always
>
> 11 knows where you are. The second thing was the weather. The wind pushed into my hood and carried a thin rain that didn’t fall, exactly, so much as hover and sting. The moor changed mood quickly. It stopped being postcard scenery and turned into a huge, empty room with no walls. The path narrowed and the grass on either side looked like it had been combed flat by invisible hands. The trail I’d followed out
>
> 16 had been obvious. On the way back, it was a suggestion. The rain had darkened the ground so everything looked the same shade of brown-green. The wooden posts, which I remembered as frequent, seemed to have gone into hiding. I walked for ten minutes and didn’t recognise the bend I was sure I’d taken. I walked for another ten and still couldn’t find the familiar patch of heather I’d photographed earlier. That was when the
>
> 21 blue dot stopped being brave. The screen froze, the map went grey, and the phone switched off with a neat little sigh. I stood there holding a dead rectangle of plastic, as if I could argue it back to life. Then I saw it: a line of darker shapes against the grey, a low wall of stones, half-collapsed, running across the slope. It wasn’t a miracle. It wasn’t a cabin with a roaring fire. It
>
> 26 was just a wall. But it was human. It meant someone had been here and cared enough to place stones in a straight line. I walked to it and followed it, keeping my left hand on the cold rock so I couldn’t drift away from it. The wall dipped into a shallow hollow where the wind was less fierce. I crouched there, pulling my knees up, and for the first time that afternoon I made
>
> 31 a sensible decision: I would conserve myself. After what felt like hours, I saw a faint glow to the west. It wasn’t the moon; it was too steady. A farmhouse window, maybe. I waited and watched, and when I was sure it didn’t move, I started walking again, staying low, still tracing the wall until it ended at a gate. Beyond the gate was a track, and tracks mean people. By the time I reached
>
> 36 the farmhouse, my cheeks were numb and my legs were shaking, but the relief was so sharp it almost hurt. I knocked on the door with a hand that didn’t feel like mine. When it opened, warm air spilled out, and a woman stared at me as if I’d been posted through her letterbox. I tried to answer properly, like a normal person. What came out was a sort of laugh and a croak. “I’m
>
> 41 lost,” I managed, and then, because honesty finally arrived, “and my phone’s dead.” She didn’t scold me. She didn’t lecture. She just ushered me into a kitchen that smelled of toast and wet dog, and she handed me a mug of tea. The steam rose between my hands like a small, steady promise. Later, when the farmer drove me back to town, the moor lay behind us in the dark, quiet and innocent, as if
>
> 46 it had done nothing at all. At home, Mum hugged me so hard my ribs complained. I stood there, smelling her shampoo, thinking about that moment when the screen went black. Losing the phone hadn’t been the real danger. The danger was the way I’d assumed the world would always draw a neat line back to safety.

### Source B

Source B is an extract from a Travel writing in which a Victorian clerk describes losing his way in a winter fog on the fens and relying on sound, straight landmarks and local kindness to reach shelter.

> 1 I set forth on a Saturday in December, meaning to walk before dusk to a market town some eight miles distant, and to return on the Monday with my lungs refreshed and my spirits improved. At noon I quitted the turnpike, tempted by a green track that crossed the low fen-fields; for the little map in my pocket assured me that, by keeping a certain main drain upon my left hand, I might save near
>
> 6 a mile. All the afternoon the sky hung low and colourless, and towards four o’clock a white mist began to creep up from the water-courses. In half an hour it thickened into a blindness. The next gate-post vanished as I approached it; a man might have walked into his own shadow and never found the way out again. I had counted on taking my bearings from a church-tower; but towers, like good intentions, are of
>
> 11 little service when hidden. The track split at a stile, and, choosing as I thought the straighter course, I came within minutes among rushes, with black water shining at my feet. It was then that I resolved to do what pride had prevented me from doing earlier: to stop and observe. I listened. There was no friendly sound of wheel or hoof; only the faint creak of reeds, and, far away, the slow striking of
>
> 16 a bell, as though some unseen hand were counting out my folly. I walked towards that bell. By good fortune—or by the mere habit of continuing in one direction—I came upon an embankment, higher and firmer than the fields. Along it marched a line of telegraph posts, their tops swallowed by the whiteness, their bases dark with wet. I took these for my companions. Their straightness was a comfort; and, keeping close to them, I
>
> 21 put my hand now and then upon the wire as upon a rail, lest I should drift away into the ditches. Night fell without ceremony. The mist did not so much darken as change its hue, from milk to lead. My fingers were numb upon my stick; my breath came short; and I began to understand how easily a man may persuade himself to sit down “for a moment” and rise no more. At that
>
> 26 instant a small point of light wavered ahead, low to the ground, and I hailed it with all the strength left in me. It proved to be a fen-labourer, trudging home with a lantern and a dog. He looked me over, laughed, and said that town folk did choose queer nights for walking; yet he turned at once, and, bidding me keep close lest the drains should take me, led me along the bank to
>
> 31 a lock-keeper’s cottage. The cottage, crouched behind a screen of willows, had a window that glowed dull red through the vapour. Within, the lock-keeper’s wife set me by the range and placed before me a basin of broth and a hunch of bread so coarse and so welcome that I ate like a schoolboy. Later the lock-keeper himself guided me to the road with the patience one gives a child. I reached the market town
>
> 36 long after my appointed hour, wet to the bone but wiser in the geography of fear. Since that evening I have never mocked the flatness of the fens: in such a place, where everything looks alike, it is the smallest mark—a post, a sound, a lamp—that keeps a man from being swallowed by the dark.

---

## Questions

### Materials

For this paper you must have:

- Source A and Source B – provided as a separate Insert.

### Instructions

- Answer **all** questions.
- Use black ink or black ball-point pen.
- Fill in the boxes at the top of this page.
- You must answer the questions in the spaces provided.
- Do not write outside the box around each page or on blank pages.
- If you need extra space for your answer(s), use the lined pages at the end of this book. Write the question number against your answer(s).
- Do all rough work in this book. Cross through any work you do not want to be marked.
- You must refer to the Insert booklet provided.
- You must not use a dictionary.

### Information

- The marks for questions are shown in brackets.
- Time allowed: 1 hour 45 minutes
- The maximum mark for this paper is 80.
- There are 40 marks for Section A and 40 marks for Section B.
- You are reminded of the need for good English and clear presentation in your answers.
- You will be assessed on the quality of your reading in Section A.
- You will be assessed on the quality of your writing in Section B.

### Advice

- You are advised to spend about 15 minutes reading through the sources and all five questions you have to answer.
- You are advised to plan your answer to Question 5 before you start to write.
- You should make sure you leave sufficient time to check your answers.

### Section A: Reading

Answer all questions in this section.
You are advised to spend about 45 minutes on this section.

#### Question 1

Read again the first part of Source A from **lines 1 to 16**.
Choose four statements below which are true.

- Shade the circles in the boxes of the ones that you think are true.
- Choose a maximum of four statements.
- If you make an error cross out the whole box.
- If you change your mind and require a statement that has been crossed out then draw a circle around the box.

A. The narrator told Mum it was just a quick walk.
  
B. The plan included taking photos for a geography project.
  
C. The narrator planned to drive to the moor alone.

D. The first problem was a message showing 10% battery.

E. They immediately panicked when the battery warning appeared.
  
F. The narrator turned the phone brightness up to see better.

G. The wind pushed into the narrator’s hood with thin rain.

H. The moor stayed like postcard scenery the whole time.

[4 marks]

#### Question 2

You need to refer to Source A and Source B for this question.
Use details from both Source A and Source B to infer how each writer shows the walker becoming lost and then finding a way back to safety. What similarities and differences can you make?

[8 marks]

#### Question 3

You now need to refer only to Source A from lines 36 to 46.
How does the writer use language in lines 36 to 46 to present the narrator’s fear and relief as they reach the farmhouse?
You could include the writer's choice of:

- words and phrases
- language features and techniques
- sentence forms

[12 marks]

#### Question 4

For this question, you need to refer to the whole of Source A, together with the whole of Source B.
Compare how the writers of Source A and Source B present their feelings and perspectives about getting lost in a harsh terrain, and what attitudes they convey about relying on guidance or landmarks.
In your answer, you could:

- compare their different feelings and perspectives
- comment on the methods the writers use to convey their feelings and perspectives
- support your response with references to both texts.

[16 marks]

## Section B: Writing

You are advised to spend about 45 minutes on this section.
Write in full sentences.
You are reminded of the need to plan your answer.
You should leave enough time to check your work at the end.

### Question 5

"Getting lost in the countryside at night is only dangerous if you panic, not if you use basic common sense."

Write a speech for a school assembly aimed at Year 10 pupils to persuade them to take night-time countryside safety seriously and to explain what they should do if they become lost.

(24 marks for content and organisation, 16 marks for technical accuracy)

[40 marks]


AQA GCSE English Language 8700/2 - Writers' viewpoints and perspectives - Practice Exam 1