Small sacrifices
Text 1: Why There Is No Sugar, by Lydia Fairbrother
An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
My dear Cousin, You asked why our table has had no sugar upon it since Lady Day, and why the children take their tea bitter and their puddings sweetened only with honey from Mr Ellis’s hives. I will tell you plainly. Every pound of West India sugar that comes into this house was grown and cut by men and women held as slaves, flogged when they faltered and sold when they were no longer useful. When I learned this, from a little pamphlet a lady left at the door, I could not look at the sugar basin without seeing blood in it.
I do not pretend that our abstention is any great sacrifice. The children grumbled for a fortnight, and little Tom wept over his rice pudding as if it had been his dog. Mr Fairbrother still takes sugar at his club, I suspect, though he does not confess it. And I am not so foolish as to think that one house in one country town will empty a single plantation. The planters will not miss our two pounds a week.
But it is not one house. The lady with the pamphlet told me that three hundred thousand families in this kingdom have given up the sugar, and that the grocers in Bristol complain of it. If every one of us gives up a little, the whole amounts to a great deal, as the sea is made of drops. And there is something more. Each time the children ask why there is no sugar, I must tell them why, and so they learn, at seven and nine years old, that what we put in our mouths is joined to what is done to others far away. I think that lesson alone is worth the honey.
Text 2: Five Years Without a Plane, by Marcus Delaney
An original contemporary blog.
Five years ago I stopped flying. It was not a dramatic decision. I read a report about aviation emissions on a Sunday afternoon, did some arithmetic on the back of a gas bill, and worked out that my two holidays a year produced more carbon than everything else I did put together. So I stopped. I have not been on a plane since.
I would love to tell you that this has saved the planet. It has not. The seats I did not book were sold to somebody else. The planes took off without me, full, and will go on doing so. I missed my best friend’s wedding in Portugal, which I will always regret, and my mother, who lives in Spain, has had to come to me every time, which she reminds me of often. Some of my friends think I am admirable; more think I am smug. On a bad day I suspect they are right.
And yet I have not changed my mind, for two reasons. The first is simply that I could not keep saying the climate mattered while behaving as though it did not. The second surprised me. In five years, three of my friends have quietly given up flying too, and one of them, who works for a large company, persuaded it to stop sending staff to conferences by air. I did not ask them to. They watched someone ordinary do it and survive. I do not know whether that is a real difference. It is the only kind I know how to make.
‘Both writers believe that small personal sacrifices can make a real difference.’
How far do you agree with this statement?
In your answer you should:
Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.
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.