The bathhouse ledger
An original account written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
At the public baths I received a towel and a brass token stamped with the number seven. The attendant entered my payment in a ledger whose pages were swollen with steam. I had expected to undress behind a curtain, but each bather was given a small room with a bolt. For the first time that day I could put down my belongings without keeping one eye upon them. Outside, the queue advanced noisily; inside, the closed door gave me a little kingdom of quiet.
Give one phrase that suggests the narrator feels protected from noise inside the room.
160 exam-style questions on OCR GCSE English Language 2.3 Section A: Reading information and ideas – skills, covering 2.3.1 Identify and interpret key ideas, 2.3.2 Comment on writers’ language choices, 2.3.4 Summarise and synthesise across texts, 2.3.7 Evaluate usefulness, bias and misuse of evidence, 2.3.8 Use context to inform reading, and 2.3.9 Explore connections across texts. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.