| Re: IGCSE Last years question paper
Here is the IGCSE Last years question paper:
Imagine that you live near to Gatsby’s house where the parties take place. You object to the
parties for several reasons, including the lavish display of wealth.
Write a letter to the owner of the house, setting out your various objections and justifying each
one by developing ideas and details from the passage.
You should write about 1½ to 2 sides, allowing for the size of your handwriting.
Begin your letter: Dear Mr Gatsby…
Up to fifteen marks will be available for the content of your answer and up to five marks for the
quality of your writing.
Read Passage A carefully, and then answer Questions 1 and 2.
Passage A
In this extract from a novel called The Great Gatsby, the narrator describes Gatsby’s lavish
parties. The story takes place in the 1920s.
There was music from my neighbour's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men
and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high
tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot
sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over
cataracts of foam. On weekends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the
city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a
brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled
all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of
the night before.
Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York – every Monday
these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a
machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little
button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb.
At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and
enough coloured lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables,
garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin
designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass
rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his
female guests were too young to know one from another.
By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and
trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last
swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are
parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary
colours, and hair bobbed in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is
in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with
chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic
meetings between women who never knew each other's names.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing
yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by
minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell
with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls
who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment
the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and
voices and colour under the constantly changing light.
Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for
courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary
hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the
erroneous news goes round that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the Follies. The party has
begun.
1 Imagine that you live near to Gatsby’s house where the parties take place. You object to the
parties for several reasons, including the lavish display of wealth.
Write a letter to the owner of the house, setting out your various objections and justifying each
one by developing ideas and details from the passage.
You should write about 1½ to 2 sides, allowing for the size of your handwriting.
Begin your letter: Dear Mr Gatsby…
Up to fifteen marks will be available for the content of your answer and up to five marks for the
quality of your writing.
[20 marks]
2 Re-read paragraphs 4, 5 and 6, which describe:
(a) the lights and the colours of the party
(b) the sounds of the party.
By referring closely to the language used by the writer, explain how he makes these descriptions
effective.
[10 marks]
Part 2
Read Passage B carefully, and then answer Question 3, which is based on both Passage A and
Passage B.
Passage B
Sophia is twelve and lives in Kingale, Rwanda. Her parents are both dead. Sophia looks after
her two sisters so that most of her family can stay together. Their brother, Beaufirs, lives with
Sophia’s grandparents.
A life in the day of Sophia Ingibire Tuyisenge
If I wake up during the night I always look up at the hole in the tin roof. If I cannot see it I know I can
go back to sleep, but if it is getting light then it is nearly time to get up. My sisters, Solange, who is
three, and Claudette, who is eleven, and I all sleep in the same bed since our mother died.
Sometimes Solange wakes me up in the middle of the night to tell me what she's been dreaming
about, or that she wants to go to the toilet. But of course then we have to go outside, so I try to
persuade her to go back to sleep.
Our house is at the top of a steep hill, next to several other houses, with a small latrine. It has two
rooms. In the back room, where we sleep, I keep our food in old rice sacks and our clean clothes in
plastic bags that are hanging above the floor, so they don't get wet when the rain comes through.
Even in daytime, our bedroom is very dark, so first thing I light a paraffin lamp. Then either Claudette
or I will climb down the hill with jerry cans to get some water from the pump. It is heavy carrying them
back, and when it is raining the ground gets muddy, so you can slip all over the path. When we've got
water we make porridge, which we eat out of plastic mugs, sitting around the table in the front room.
Then Claudette goes to school while I clear up. I wash the mugs, then sweep and scrub the floor. Of
course, Solange has to help too, and she can be very noisy, as she copies me, shouting and laughing
and brushing away. She can be quite a handful, and she wants to be carried all the time. Sometimes I
wish she would stop chattering and making so much noise. But she is our little sister and we love her
very much. We are so pleased not to be separated from her. Really, I am Solange's mother now.
While Claudette is at school I give Solange a bath. I take the basin outside, pour in the water, and
Solange jumps in. I wash her hair and give her ears and her nails a good scrub while she splashes
around. After I have dried her on my knee, I rub Vaseline into her skin, like my mother showed me.
Annunciata, a social worker, gives us flour for porridge, rice and some other dried foods. She is from
a charity called Uyisenga. In the afternoon, I peel some potatoes or cook rice with cassava for the
main meal of our day, which we eat about two o'clock, when Claudette comes home and before I go
to school. Late afternoon we may play cards together, or I go down to the road and buy vegetables.
Sometimes I go to the petrol station, where I buy two litres of paraffin. Solange often comes too, and
she makes me carry her on my back for most of the way. Then I make a funnel and pour some of the
paraffin into empty Fanta bottles. I sell them at the bottom of the path to our house, for 20 Rwandan
francs (a tiny amount). The money I earn pays for our soap and vegetables.
Sometimes Solange chatters so much I try to persuade her to go to bed early with a biscuit. But
mostly I am so tired, we go to bed at the same time. It is better if we do all go to bed together,
because we don't waste our paraffin by lighting the lamp. Every night I think about my mother as I lie
in bed. I miss her so much. She told us that we should be brave and we must look after our brother
and little sister. She told us we should have no fear because God would look after us. We can see
that is true: today, two years after she died, we are doing just fine.
3 Read Passage B and re-read Passage A.
Summarise the main features of the lifestyles described in each passage.
You should write about 1 side in total, allowing for the size of your handwriting.
Up to fifteen marks will be available for the content of your answer and up to five marks for the
quality of your writing.
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