A visit to the salt store
An original account written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
The warehouse keeper would not let me inspect the lower sacks. Rain had entered through a split in the roof during the night, and the bags beneath it had begun to dissolve into one another. He placed a handful from the upper shelf upon a slate for me to examine. Those crystals were dry, yet I could not judge the whole delivery by the portion he had chosen. My employer expected an account of every sack, not merely the finest handful in the building.
Explain two reasons why the narrator cannot assess the whole delivery from the keeper’s sample.
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.