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Paper 2 Question 3 need an answer

How does the writer use language to describe the toy shop at Christmas?

Christmas is coming. The lights are up, the shops are crowded, and my five-year-old son is sitting in front of the television repeating a mantra every 30 seconds during the commercial breaks (with pauses only for Barbie ads): ‘I want that. I want that. I want that.’ Working out what he really wants in the middle of this deluge of advertising is hard enough; but then, if what he’s chosen turns out to be this year’s favourite, the problem is getting it. Last-minute toy shortages have become such a feature of the festive season that there’s even been a Christmas-shopping action movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s dismal 1996 flop Jingle All The Way, in which he plays a dad battling through the malls on Christmas Eve for that season’s must-have toy, a Turboman doll. To prove the cliché that it seems to come earlier each year, this time round the Christmas queues started on Thursday 7 September, when shops gave out pre-order forms for Sony’s much-anticipated PlayStation 2 computer games console. Forms were strictly rationed, and some shops in London opened at midnight to satisfy demand. By the following Monday, there were none left in most parts of the country, and although the console was released here just two days ago, only customers who ordered in September will be able to collect their hardware in time for Christmas.

Reply 1

absolutelysprout

if this is from a paper publicly available, you can use the mark scheme as guidance. what have you got down yourself??

Reply 2

Broque_

In the exam you should spend 15 mins at most on this question and come out with 3 paragraphs or 2 very detailed ones. Some easy and versatile techniques you can always analyse are lexical field, symbolism of different aspects of the extract and the five senses (examiners love this). One way to show that you're a high level thinker is to always do combination analysis in the paragraph, this means taking 2 ideas or devices and linking them, for instance "The brutal metaphors `...` exemplifies.... which is reinforced by the lexical field of tragedy..."

Below I have underlined a few phrases you can focus on

Original post by maryamg..

Christmas is coming. The lights are up, the shops are crowded, and my five-year-old son is sitting in front of the television repeating a mantra every 30 seconds during the commercial breaks (with pauses only for Barbie ads): ‘I want that. I want that. I want that.’ Working out what he really wants in the middle of this deluge of advertising is hard enough; but then, if what he’s chosen turns out to be this year’s favourite, the problem is getting it. Last-minute toy shortages have become such a feature of the festive season that there’s even been a Christmas-shopping action movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s dismal 1996 flop Jingle All The Way, in which he plays a dad battling through the malls on Christmas Eve for that season’s must-have toy, a Turboman doll. To prove the cliché that it seems to come earlier each year, this time round the Christmas queues started on Thursday 7 September, when shops gave out pre-order forms for Sony’s much-anticipated PlayStation 2 computer games console. Forms were strictly rationed, and some shops in London opened at midnight to satisfy demand. By the following Monday, there were none left in most parts of the country, and although the console was released here just two days ago, only customers who ordered in September will be able to collect their hardware in time for Christmas.