The missing caption
At the exhibition entrance, I stopped beneath a photograph of a woman standing beside a half-built bridge. The caption named the engineer, the year and the length of the main span. I recognised the woman’s coat before her face: my grandmother had kept it behind the bedroom door. I asked the attendant why she was in the picture. He fetched a folder, and together we found a list of surveyors. Her name was third. At home, I had thought of her as the person who measured curtains and kept spare buttons in a tin. That evening I opened her sewing box and looked again at the ruler.
Explain how the ending changes the significance of the grandmother’s sewing equipment. Refer to the structure of the passage in your answer.
40 exam-style questions on AQA GCSE English Language 3.1 Critical reading and comprehension, covering 3.1.1 Identify and interpret themes, ideas and information, 3.1.2 Read in different ways for different purposes, 3.1.3 Draw inferences and justify with evidence, 3.1.4 Support a point of view using textual evidence, 3.1.5 Identify bias and misuse of evidence, 3.1.6 Reflect critically and evaluatively using context, 3.1.7 Recognise different responses to a text, 3.1.8 Identify the main theme or themes, 3.1.9 Summarise ideas and information from a single text, 3.1.10 Synthesise from more than one text, 3.1.11 Explain how vocabulary and grammar create impact, 3.1.12 Analyse and evaluate form and structure, and 3.1.13 Compare texts critically. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.