Model Answers
Models to take apart. Under each one, notes explaining what makes it work.
Read this first
- These are teaching materials written by RCF English, not official answers, and not the only acceptable answers.
- Do not memorise them. A memorised answer does not fit the question you are actually asked, and examiners recognise it immediately.
- The examples on this page use an invented text, so that the method can be shown without reproducing a copyrighted work. Model answers on the individual text pages refer to the real prescribed texts.
- The notes are the lesson. The answer is only the example.
Model 1 — A three-mark context answer
Question: What does the mother's silence in this scene reveal about her relationship with her husband? (3 marks)
Her silence shows that she has learnt that speaking will change nothing.
She does not contradict him even when she is described as looking at the door, which suggests that she has already decided to act rather than to argue.
The relationship therefore appears to be one in which she has stopped seeking agreement, and this prepares the reader for her departure in the following chapter.
Why this answer works
- Three marks, three sentences. The answer does not sprawl.
- Sentence one gives the point. Sentence two gives the evidence and explains it. Sentence three gives the effect and links forward.
- The evidence is precise — looking at the door — without needing a long quotation.
- Nothing is retold. The reader of the answer is assumed to know the scene.
Model 2 — A full essay answer
Question: How far do you agree that the father's pride is the cause of his family's suffering?
The father's pride is the most visible cause of the family's suffering, but it is not, in the end, the deepest one. The writer shows a man whose refusal of help is real and damaging, yet also shows the poverty and the loss of work that made such a refusal feel necessary to him. Pride is therefore better understood as the form his suffering takes than as its origin.
The most obvious damage certainly comes from his refusals. When his son offers him money, he replies, "I have managed thirty years without it," turning a simple offer into a statement about his own endurance. The precision of the figure makes the reply sound rehearsed, as though he has been waiting years for the chance to say it. The effect on the reader is uncomfortable rather than admiring: we recognise his dignity, but we also see that his son has been refused something more than money. From this point the two men speak to each other only through the mother.
The writer, however, is careful to show where the pride came from. In the second chapter we learn that he was dismissed after twenty-two years without explanation, and that he continued to leave the house each morning at the same hour for a month afterwards so that the neighbours would not know. A man who will walk out of his own door every morning to protect his family's reputation is not simply vain. His pride is presented as a defence built in a particular situation, and the writer expects the reader to see it as such before judging him.
It would be too easy, though, to excuse him entirely. The novel makes clear that the defence outlives the danger. By the final section the family's circumstances have improved, and yet he refuses the same help he refused years earlier, when it would have made a real difference. His silence towards his son is described as "a habit he no longer remembered choosing", and that phrase is the writer's judgement on him: pride which began as protection has become something automatic, and it is this automatic quality, not the pride itself, that does the lasting harm.
The suffering of the family therefore has two causes working together, and the writer refuses to separate them neatly. Poverty and humiliation created the pride; the pride outlived them and hardened into silence. To say simply that pride caused the suffering would be to accept the view of the neighbours in the novel, who see only the refusals. The reader, who has been shown the month of empty mornings, is asked to reach a more difficult conclusion: that the father is both the author of his family's unhappiness and one of its victims.
Why this answer works
- The introduction takes a position and qualifies it immediately. That is exactly what how far do you agree asks for.
- Each body paragraph begins with a point, never with an event: The most obvious damage…, The writer, however, is careful…, It would be too easy, though…
- The structure is an argument, not a list. Paragraph two agrees with the question; paragraph three complicates it; paragraph four answers the complication. The essay moves.
- Quotations are short — nine words and seven words. Two quotations are enough for an essay of this length.
- The effect on the reader is stated explicitly more than once: uncomfortable rather than admiring, asked to reach a more difficult conclusion.
- The conclusion judges. It does not summarise the paragraphs; it decides between them, and its final sentence says something the introduction did not.
- The tense is the present throughout for what happens in the text: he replies, the writer shows, the novel makes clear.
- Notice the length: five paragraphs. This is achievable in the time available. Higher marks come from development, not from volume.
How to use a model answer properly
- Read the question and plan your own answer for five minutes before reading the model.
- Read the model once for the argument. What position does it take?
- Read it again and mark the five parts in each paragraph: point, evidence, explanation, effect, link.
- Read the notes and see how many you had spotted.
- Cover the model and write your own answer to the same question.
- Compare, and identify one thing to change next time.