Higher

1. Higher Close Reading

2. The Big PictureYou will sit a second paper in the exam. This will test your READING skills. This is known as the Reading for Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation paper or UAE. Two non-fiction texts will be presented. You will read Passage 1 and answer a set of questions on it. You will read Passage 2. There are no questions on this passage. You will then answer one question which asks you to compare some aspect of Passage 1 and Passage 2. You will have 1 hour and 30 minutes to complete this paper. • The paper will have 30 marks. • Each question will be worth between 2 and 5 marks. • Questions on the texts will demonstrate the skills of understanding, analysis and evaluation.

3. What is Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation?

4. Understanding • It is important to understand what is Meant by the terms Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation: Understanding: Have you understood what the writer is trying to say? Do you understand the different arguments? • These questions are about: • meanings of words and phrases • reasons for things • how things happen • explaining ideas • identifying the writer’s feelings/attitudes • understanding the writer’s argument

5. Analysis Analysis: Can you identify features of language and discuss their relationship with the ideas of the passage? Features of language might include word choice, imagery, tone, sentence structure, punctuation, sound techniques, and so on. • These questions are about: • word choice • context • figures of speech • sentence structure • linking and general structure • tone

6. Evaluation Evaluation:Can you make a judgement on the writer’s ideas or use of language? • In these questions you should: • pick out and name techniques • always quote • do not be vague -pick out specific examples • express an opinion or make a judgment

7. Tackling the Passage • Read the italics section at the beginning and the title for clues about what the passage is about: • who wrote it? • where did it come from? • what is it about? • what clues are you given by the title? • When you attempt a passage you should always do the following: Read the whole passage before tackling the questions. You may misunderstand a question or write down an incomplete or wrong answer because you do not have an overall context for it. • Read the whole question underlining key words • check the number of marks and ensure you write enough • number each question accurately • don’t miss any out • ensure you answer from the correct line numbers.

8. Re-Cap • At this point in the unit, you should now know more about attempting the Reading for U, A & E papers than you did before. • In the next 2 minutes jot down 3 things which you have learned about performing well in this paper. • This can be about what you have learned about the terms Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation, things to do when reading the passages or anything else which you know now but didn’t know before. • When your time is up, starting with the youngest person in your group, explain to the rest of the group the 3 things which you have written down.

9. Newspapers

10. Practice with Quality Journalism • You wouldn’t dream of turning up for your driving test without having taken lessons and practised your driving skills beforehand. • The same applies to the Reading for U, A & E paper – you must practise and improve on your reading skills throughout the year if you want to achieve your potential in the final exam. • The best way to do this is to commit to reading articles from quality newspapers on a regular basis – at least once a week. This will help you to become familiar with the style and standard of writing to expect in the exam.

11. Which Newspapers? • The following newspapers are examples of quality journalism and these are often the source of reading passages:

12. Useful Websites • In addition to looking at newspapers, you may wish to look online at newspaper websites and read different articles there. • The important thing is that you build the reading of quality journalism into your regular routine. Start with the articles which interest you e.g. sport, celebrity stories but after a few weeks challenge yourself to read news and political stories. • www.heraldscotland.com • www.theguardian.com/uk • www.scotsman.com • newstrust.net • http://time.com/

13. Analysing Articles • If you begin regularly reading quality journalism NOW then by the time you sit your exam you will have a far greater understanding of how writers structure articles and how they use techniques to back up the points they are making. • There are certain things which you can do when reading an article in order to build up your reading skills and prepare you for the exam. These are looked at in more detail on the following slides.

14. Maximising Success • There are a number of things which you can do for practice in order to reach your potential in this element of the exam: 3. Write a summary of the article in 3 bullet points 2. Explain what you have read to someone else at home 1. Read quality journalism every week – either buy the newspaper or read articles online 5. Practise Close Reading papers! 4. Look up the meaning of any words which you are unsure about and keep a note of these

15. Pair Work • You will now have the chance to put these tips into practice with an actual newspaper article. • The article appears on the following slides. AS YOU READ: Write down the main points of the article Write down any words you are not sure of Write down any questions you have Write down any information you learn about the article (date/publication etc)

16. Cut out the costly coffee Let's do a sum. On the way to work every morning, I buy a regular black coffee. It costs me £1.40. That's seven quid a working week. £315 a year, excluding holidays. I've been doing this for about five years or so. Which means I've spent more than £1500 on coffees. That's the first time I've done that sum. Blimey. I don't care how good the coffee is. That is a waste of money. • I was inspired to get out my calculator by the recent stories on the health pages about the calorie count of the average high-street coffee. The figures were pretty staggering: 628 calories in a large white-chocolate mocha; 396 in a whole-milk caffe mocha; 326 in a medium mocha with whipped cream. But what struck me about those stories is that no-one mentioned the other, far more shocking figure. The price.

17. When did it become acceptable - socially desirable, even - to spend between £1.40 and £3 on a coffee? A single shot of espresso from Starbucks is around £1.40; Caffe Nero charges around £1.80 for a cappuccino; a medium cappuccino at Costa is £2.27. Of course, you don't have to go to the big high-street chains - but the standard elsewhere is on the whole pretty low. I want good coffee. I just don't think I should have to pay quite so much for it. • The price of coffee has just reached a 10-and-a-half-year high, but that should be no excuse for the increasingly ridiculous price of the cup you drink. The cost of the original coffee represents a tiny part of the total price - the rest is made up of staff costs, the costs of stores and, of course, the profit margin. And that's the point. Coffee is expensive because the profit margin is big - among the biggest on the high street.

18. I don't want to rant at Starbucks because its arrival in Scotland - arguments about the homogenisation of the high street aside - was a positive thing. Until about 10 years ago, Scotland was a predominantly tea-drinking nation; while a cup of tea was cheap and good, coffee was cheap and bad. I love the coffee and the food in the new cafe culture, but Starbucks and the other biggies need to become leaders in the next step of that revolution. • There are already some signs that they might be doing so. Last month, Starbucks announced that, in some stores in Seattle, it would be trying a new policy: selling a simple cup of coffee for a dollar. It was a recognition that, in a time of slowing consumer spending, the triple-chocolate mochaccino (with flake) might be one of the first things to get the chop.

19. I don't want to be part of the obsession with cheapness on the high street. I know that low prices have sometimes been shown to mean high costs somewhere else: the quality of the product, or of the lives of the people producing it. But I have finally had enough of paying £1.40 every morning. Tomorrow I might just try tea. • First published Feb 2008 • Mark Smith • Herald http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/2018122.Cut_out_the_costly_coffee/

20. The rent racket: tenants are trapped in a game of Monopoly that won't end • Private landlords enjoy an absurd level of power over tenants. Yet they reject even minimal regulation. by Zoe Williams For sport this week I have tried to chase up the deposits of a couple of tenants I met on Twitter. I think some letting agents see it as a matter of honour not to return the full amount. They are like playground bullies who would rinse you for a piece of string rather than leave you unmolested. One tenant, in London, had been waiting six weeks for his deposit, despite having caused no damage. The reason given by the letting agent was that the landlord was abroad and "quite a difficult person". Another had a third of her amount withheld for gardening costs, despite the fact that there was no evidence of damage, and nothing at all to suggest that the landlord had been left out of pocket, which is the criterion for failing to return a deposit.

21. Asked for something as simple as photographic proof, the agent replied: "We have no proof, but I don't believe we would have rented it out like that." When you ask as a journalist, however, these difficulties and infractions evaporate, and the money materialises; it's almost as if the objections were completely cooked up in the first place. I am struck by the bald impunity of it, the shoulder-shrugging certainty that the boot is never going to change feet. There is something wrong with this market, and that is because it is asymmetrical: the returns for the landlord are massive. Every year of the past 18, money put into a buy-to-let mortgage has returned an average of 16.3% – all the way through a recession, immune to the slings and arrows hitting every other asset class. In the private rented sector, a third of homes are classed as non-decent (PDF). Whichever way you cut it, those landlords are rapacious – and there are plenty of them. Average rents in England and Wales will reach £765 a month by May and £800 by this time next year. It pleases the Residential Landlords Association (RLA) to compare rent costs to CPI inflation, but the salient comparison is with wages, which have been stagnant or falling for over five years.

22. Those brilliant returns for landlords are not free; or in other words, they are not windfalls from a beneficent universe. They are the direct result of a market in which people are being screwed for more and more of their income in rent. They cannot, therefore, amass the capital to buy, and so have to rent for longer, leaving them even more powerless in the face of price increases that bear no relation to their income. It's a racket, in other words: a game of Monopoly that won't end. I wouldn't be moved to point out such blindingly obvious things were it not for a report published yesterday by the RLA that actually argues for less regulation. Regulation, incidentally, has been mainly responsible for the only improvements that have occurred within the sector. Since the introduction of the Tenancy Deposit Protection (TDP) scheme, in 2007, the percentage of tenants contesting withheld deposits has fallen from 40% to 1%. In the study written by Michael Ball of the University of Reading's Henley Business School, this very fact – that the number of unfairly held deposits is now pretty low – is used to argue that the scheme is a waste of money. Ball concludes that regulation is too expensive, and has poor returns.

23. The rationale is that the worst landlords are "unfazed" by punishment, while the best of them pick up the cost. This argument is typical of the way people with money are treated in economic equations (consider the similarities with the debate around higher rate taxation). Having agency, their likely behaviour is considered salient when decisions are made about the rules by which they should be bound. If they are likely to be unscrupulous, this militates against requiring scruples of them. Elsewhere in society the existence of dishonest people is used as an argument for more regulation, not less. The study contends, too, that a shortage of housing equates to a "shortage of investment", which must be tackled by removing hurdles for people who want to invest. It's cynical and absurd. There is a shortage precisely because the only people investing are doing so for returns, and very few are investing for the sake of housing people. These aims are at odds: the profit motive is driving up rents and driving down standards. Only 15% of houses in the social sector fail to meet the minimum standards for decency. Even the success of the TDP scheme has to be put in a wider context.

24. As Channel 4 reported earlier in the year, a the fact that there is no registered body for landlords; they can withhold a deposit, be reprimanded by the scheme, and simply set up as another company. Words such as daft, unscrupulous and dishonest are diversions. The problem here is not with the personalities of landlords or letting agents but with the fact that they have too much power. The tenants’ group Generation Rent says landlords should be registered, and argues for more secure tenure. At the moment, letting agents advise setting one-year contracts because this makes it easier to ratchet the rent up. Generation Rent also points out that the poorest are also the most likely to have bad landlords, because they are the least able to front the cost of moving. With one party able to evict at any time, the power imbalance becomes absurd. It is no surprise that a fifth of students live in properties infested with vermin. In the face of an urgent need for regulation, landlords argue for less. Nothing makes plainer their overweening power than this report, the audacity with which they tell you black is white.

25. Homework • You now have the skills to read and analyse quality journalism. • As with any skill, the more you practise it, the better you will become. • You may be set some regular homework to read quality journalism each week. • By the time you sit your final exam, you will be able to read and understand complex written passages with ease!

26. Learning Intention • Today we are learning how to answer questions that are designed to test our understanding of a text.

27. Success Criteria • I can identify when a question is asking me to show my understanding of the text • I can provide an answer appropriate to the marks offered • I can also summarise information from a text in my own words, give the meaning of words from context and comment on the progression of the writer’s ideas

28. Understanding • It is important to understand what is Meant by the terms Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation: Understanding: Have you understood what the writer is trying to say? Do you understand the different arguments? • These questions are about: • meanings of words and phrases • reasons for things • how things happen • explaining ideas • identifying the writer’s feelings/attitudes • understanding the writer’s argument

29. Identifying the question type There are some common phrases used in understanding questions:- • Explain fully the reason… • Explain how… • In your own words… • Summarise the main points… • Identify ways in which… • By referring closely to these lines… • Show how the sentence… performs a linking function. • Show how the context helps you to understand…

30. Using Your Own Words When you are asked to answer a question using your own words, then you must do exactly that. Basically the examiner is looking to see how much you understand in the passage. WARNING!! It is essential that you do not “lift” whole phrases or sentences as these will not be awarded with any marks, even if you have understood the question and the answer is correct. How Much To Write? • Before you write your answer, you must take note of the number of marks available. For TWO MARKS you will probably need to supply TWO pieces of information, BUT you might be required to give one detailed piece or four brief ones. • USE YOUR COMMON SENSE! ONE brief piece of information will be inadequate for a FOUR mark question; BUT providing a TEN line answer for a ONE mark question will waste time.

31. Worked Example Look at the following example. • Thinking of Grandpa now, I recall the clouds of pungent smoke that he puffed from his favourite briar, his small shrewd eyes, still very blue, and the gleaming dome rising from fleecy tufts of white hair. • Question: What three characteristics of "Grandpa" does the author remember? 3 marks

32. Answer • Answer: She remembers her grandfather smoked a strong-smelling pipe. He also hadintelligent bright blue eyes and a bald head with little fluffy patches of white hair. • Method: Understanding of "briar" is shown by using the more general term "pipe". The metaphor "gleaming dome" is simplified to "bald head". Since the word "eyes" is acommon word with no obvious alternatives it may be used again. There are severalpossible alternative words for "shrewd", and "intelligent" is an acceptable one. Since"grandpa" is colloquial, the more formal "grandfather" is used in the answer.

33. For Practice FOR PRACTICE Use the same method in the following examples, providing more or less detail as thenumber of marks suggests. • Jim scarcely recognised his long hair and grey cheeks, the strange face in a strange mirror. He would stare at the ragged figure who appeared before him in all the mirrors of the Columbia Road, an urchin half his previous size and twice his previous age. • Question: Give four changes in his appearance that Jim notices when he looks at himself in the mirror. 2 marks

34. Myself, my family, my generation, were born in a world of silence; a world of hard work and necessary patience, of backs bent to the ground, hands massaging the crops, of waiting on weather and growth; of villages like ships in the empty landscapes and the long walking distances between them; of white narrow roads, rutted by hooves and cartwheels, innocent of oil or petrol, down which people passed rarely, and almost never for pleasure, and the horse was the fastest thing moving. Question (i) What was the nature of agricultural work during the author's childhood? 2 marks

35. When one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Question: Explain why the author found Barcelona astonishing. 4 marks

36. Perhaps the greatest of all these masters of the latter part of the sixteenth century was Jacopo Robusti, nicknamed Tintoretto. He too had tired of the simple beauty in forms and colours which Titian had shown to the Venetians -but his discontent must have been more than a mere desire to accomplish the unusual. He seems to have felt that, however incomparable Titian was as a painter of beauty, his pictures tended to be more pleasing than moving; that they were not sufficiently exciting to make the great stories of the Bible and the sacred legends live for us. Whether he was right or not, he must, at any rate, have been resolved to tell these stories in a different way, to make the spectator feel the thrill and tense drama of the events he painted. Question (i) Why, according to the author, was Tintoretto dissatisfied with Titian's work? 3 marks

37. Context Another type of UNDERSTANDING question is context. Context questions are used to show you understand the meaning of particular words and phrases from the text surrounding it. These questions are NOT designed to test your vocabulary, instead they are really testing your powers of deduction. e.g Show how the context helps you to understand the meaning of...

38. Context • These questions are usually worth TWO marks – this means that you have to do TWO things: • Explain the meaning of the word or phrase • Show how you deduced the meaning from its placing in the text. • IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU DON’T JUST PROVIDE A DICTIONARY DEFINITION. DON’T WORRY IF YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN THE WORD BEFORE – SOMETIMES THIS IS BEST!! • You must quote words or phrases that provide clues and briefly explain how they help you confirm the meaning.

39. WORKED EXAMPLE USING FORMULA Question:Show how the context helped you arrive at the meaning of the word IMPLACABLE. (2 marks) • Text: Silverstein was implacable in pursuing his revenge. After years of patient searching he had finally come face to face with his father’s tormentor, and he showed no mercy.

40. Formula The word means … (1 mark) The context shows this by … (1/2 mark) Which suggests... (1/2 mark) Helpful Hint: If you are having trouble, mentally remove the word from the sentence and think about what you could replace it with. Then you have your definition.

41. Answer The word ‘implacable’ means relentless The context shows this by referring to his ‘years of patient searching’ and ‘no mercy’ Which suggests that he would never give up

42. For Practice The rumour that Douglas was a prisoner was still unsubstantiated. There had been no witnesses to his bailing and no solid information could be expected from beyond enemy lines for weeks Question: Show how the context helped you arrive at the meaning of the word unsubstantiated2 marks

43. For Practice • For two days the general vacillated. Should he give the order to advance, or shouldhe allow his men to cling to their sturdy line of defence? This hesitation was to prove fateful. 2. Oliver's first play at the Edinburgh Festival was only a qualified success. True, the critics, including some who were frequently disdainful of new writers, were lavish in their praise, and the houses were pleasingly full in the first week. But by the second week the numbers attending had inexplicably fallen away and the show was lucky to break even.

44. Link Another type of question which is designed to test your understanding of meaning, as well as your appreciation of the structure of a text, is the so-called "link" question. You will be asked to show how one sentence provides a "link" in the argument. The "argument" need not be a discussion: here "argument" means the progression of ideas in a piece of writing and the link will join one idea to the next.

45. Formula • To answer this question you need to do FOUR THINGS: • Quote the word(s) that link back into the paragraph. • Demonstrate the idea that is being discussed. • Quote the word(s) that link forward. • Demonstrate the idea(s) that is being discussed.

46. Worked Example • Question:Show how the third sentence acts as a link in the argument. (2 marks) • Text: William Shakespeare is easily the best-known of our English writers. Virtually every man in the street can name some of his plays and his characters, and many people can also recite lines of his poetry by heart. However, despite our familiarity with his work, we know relatively little of the man himself. We do not know when or why he became an actor, we know nothing of his life in London, and almost nothing of his personal concerns.

47. Answer • The phrase “our familiarity with his work” (1/2 mark) • looks back at the topic of how widely known Shakespeare’s work is. (1/2 mark) • The second part of the sentence “we know relatively little of the man himself” (1/2 mark) • introduces the new topic, namely the things that are not known about Shakespeare, and a list of these follows this “link” sentence. (1/2 mark)

48. For practice 1. My mother was born near Gloucester, in the early 1880s. Through her father, JohnLight, she had some mysterious connection with the Castle, half-forgotten, but implying a blood-link somewhere. Indeed it was said that an ancestor led the murder of Edward II. But whatever the illicit grandeurs of her forebears, Mother was born to quite ordinary poverty. When she was about thirteen years old her mother was taken ill, so she had to leave school for good. She had her five young brothers and her father to look after, and there was no one else to help.  

49. For Practice 2. Mary Stuart was certainly rated a beauty by the standards of her own time. In her height, her small neat head, and her grace she resembled the contemporary ideal. It was the type of beauty which her contemporaries were already learning to admire in art. Not only the appearance, but also the character of Mary Stuart made her admirably suited to be a princess of France in the age in which she lived. Mary was exactly the sort of beautiful woman, not precisely brilliant, but well-educated and charming, who inspired and stimulated poets by her presence to feats of homage.

50. For Practice 3. Usually his mother would caution Yang the chauffeur to avoid the old beggar who lay at the end of the drive. This beggar had arrived two months earlier, a bundle of living rags whose only possessions were a frayed paper mat and an empty tobacco tin which he shook at passers-by. He never moved from the mat, but ferociously defended his plot outside the gates. Even Boy and Number One Coolie, the houseboy and the chief scullion, had been unable to shift him. However, the position had brought the old man little benefit. There were hard times in Shanghai that winter, and after a week-long cold spell he was too tired to raise his tin. After a heavy snowfall one night in early December the snow formed a thick quilt from which the old man's face emerged like a sleeping child's above an eiderdown. Jim told himself that he never moved because he was warm under the snow.