International GCSE

Anthology
Pearson Edexcel International GCSE in English Literature (4ET1)
Pearson Edexcel International GCSE in English Language (Specification A) (4EA1)
Pearson Edexcel International GCSE in English Literature (4XET1) (Modular)
Pearson Edexcel International GCSE in English Language (Specification A)
(4XEA1) (Modular)

Issue 7
Contents

International GCSE English Language (Specification A)

Part 1: Unit 1 Section A Non-fiction texts

From The Danger of a Single Story, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 3
From A Passage to Africa, George Alagiah 5
From The Explorer’s Daughter, Kari Herbert 6
Explorers or boys messing about? Either way, taxpayer gets rescue bill, Steven Morris 7
From 127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Aron Ralston 11
Young and dyslexic? You’ve got it going on, Benjamin Zephaniah 13
From A Game of Polo with a Headless Goat, Emma Levine 15
From Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan, Jamie Zeppa 17
From H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald 20
From Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Mah 22

International GCSE English Language (Specification A)

Part 2: Unit 2 Section A Poetry and Prose texts

Disabled, Wilfred Owen 27
"Out, Out−", Robert Frost 28
An Unknown Girl, Moniza Alvi 29
The Bright Lights of Sarajevo, Tony Harrison 30
Still I Rise, Maya Angelou 31
The Story of an Hour, Kate Chopin 32
The Necklace, Guy de Maupassant 34
Significant Cigarettes (from The Road Home), Rose Tremain 40
Whistle and I’ll Come to You (from The Woman in Black), Susan Hill 44
Night, Alice Munro 46
International GCSE English Language (Specification A) – Unit 2 Section A Poetry and Prose texts

Disabled

He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,

And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
5 Voices of play and pleasures after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.
About this time Town used to swing so gay
When glow-lamps budded in the light blue trees,
And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim —
10 In the old times, before he threw away his knees.
Now he will never feel again how slim
Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands;
All of them touch him like some queer disease.
There was an artist silly for his face,
15 For it was younger than his youth, last year.
Now, he is old; his back will never brace;
He's lost his colour very far from here,
Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry,
And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race,
20 And leap of purple spurted from his thigh.
One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg,
After the matches, carried shoulder-high.
It was after football, when he'd drunk a peg,
He thought he'd better join. — He wonders why.
25 Someone had said he'd look a god in kilts,
That's why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg;
Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts
He asked to join. He didn't have to beg;
Smiling they wrote his lie; aged nineteen years.
30 Germans he scarcely thought of; all their guilt,
And Austria's, did not move him. And no fears
Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts
For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;
And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;
35 Esprit de corps; 1 and hints for young recruits.
And soon he was drafted out with drums and cheers.
Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.
Only a solemn man who brought him fruits
Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul.
40 Now, he will spend a few sick years in Institutes,
And do what things the rules consider wise,
And take whatever pity they may dole.
Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes
Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.
45 How cold and late it is! Why don't they come
And put him into bed? Why don't they come?
Wilfred Owen

1 esprit de corps: a feeling of pride in the group to which one belongs (French)

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International GCSE English Language (Specification A) – Unit 2 Section A Poetry and Prose texts

The Bright Lights of Sarajevo

After the hours that Sarajevans pass

queuing with empty canisters of gas
to get the refills they wheel home in prams,
or queuing for the precious meagre grams
5 of bread they’re rationed to each day,
and often dodging snipers on the way,
or struggling up sometimes eleven flights
of stairs with water, then you’d think that the nights
of Sarajevo would be totally devoid
10 of people walking streets Serb shells destroyed,
but tonight in Sarajevo that’s just not the case –
The young go walking at stroller’s pace,
black shapes impossible to mark
as Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark.
15 In unlit streets you can’t distinguish who
calls bread hjleb or hleb or calls it kruh.
All take the evening air with stroller’s stride,
no torches guide them, but they don’t collide
except as one of the flirtatious ploys
20 when a girl’s dark shape is fancied by a boy’s.
Then the tender radar of the tone of voice
shows by its signals she approves his choice.
Then match or lighter to a cigarette
to check in her eyes if he’s made progress yet.
25 And I see a pair who’ve certainly progressed
beyond the tone of voice and match-flare test
and he’s about, I think, to take her hand
and lead her away from where they stand
on two shell scars, where, in ‘92
30 Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue
and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread
lay on this pavement with the broken dead.
And at their feet in holes made by the mortar
that caused the massacre, now full of water
35 from the rain that’s poured down half the day,
though now even the smallest clouds have cleared away,
leaving the Sarajevo star-filled evening sky
ideally bright and clear for bomber’s eye,
in those two rain-full shell-holes the boy sees
40 fragments of the splintered Pleiades,
sprinkled on those death-deep, death-dark wells
splashed on the pavement by Serb mortar shells.
The dark boy-shape leads dark girl shape away
to share one coffee in a candlelit café
45 until the curfew, and he holds her hand
behind AID flour sacks refilled with sand.

Tony Harrison

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 International GCSE English Language (Specification A) – Unit 2 Section A Poetry and Prose texts

The Story of an Hour

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to
break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed
in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who
5 had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received,
with Brently Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to
assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less
careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed
10 inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in
her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room
alone. She would have no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank,
pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into
15 her soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver
with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a
peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing
reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
20 There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met
and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless,
except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself
to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.
25 She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a
certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away
off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but
rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it?
30 She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of
the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.
Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing
that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will--
as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been.
35 When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She
said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look
of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her
pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.
She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and
40 exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.
She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in
death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead.
But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would
belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

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45 There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself.
There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men
and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A
kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon
it in that brief moment of illumination.
50 And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What
could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-
assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!
"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhold, imploring for
55 admission. "Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door--you will make yourself ill. What
are you doing, Louise? For heaven's sake open the door."
"Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life
through that open window.
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer
60 days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life
might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be
long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a
feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of
65 Victory. She clasped her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards
stood waiting for them at the bottom.
Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who
entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had
been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He
70 stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from
the view of his wife.
But Richards was too late.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills.

Kate Chopin

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54 Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Anthology
Issue 7 – June 2024 © Pearson Education Limited 2024
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