IGCSE First Language English 0500 Past Papers and Drilling: Paper 1 Reading and Paper 2 Writing with Answers

Question 1

Mark points: (a) the first Saturday of every month, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. (2); (b) students learn soldering and sewing on the spot, and mending something gives a sense of success (2 each, 4); (c) the change is in attitude – people who repair stop treating things as disposable, and that is worth more than the object (6, with the contrast that the club promises only that you leave knowing more); (d) it makes a dead object come alive, so the reader feels that repair pays off, which persuades far better than a slogan about the environment (4); (e) the school lends the hall, neighbours may bring appliances in, and students use the tools during opening hours (2 each, 4).

Question 2

Model answer (65 words, inside the 120-word limit):
Island View College gave every student a tablet and moved homework online, cutting printing by 71 per cent in two years; its principal reports faster marking and fewer lost sheets. St Mark’s tried the same plan and gave it up: its principal says screens made students skim rather than read, so the school prints the two-page readings for every lesson and accepts the paper bill.
Mark points: rewritten in the candidate’s own words (10 reading); both schools’ action plus result present (5 writing: organisation and word choice).

Question 3

Mark points: the attitude is sceptical or resistant (2); evidence – she says screens made her students skim rather than read, and she would rather answer for the paper bill than for the reading scores (3). A bare “she does not like it” scores nothing.

Question 4

Answers: (a) flat and cold (2); (b) oldest at the bottom, as her grandfather taught her (2); (c) every 19 seconds (2); (d) she has lived there for fourteen years and counted that same rhythm, so a two-in-the-morning call is something she has long expected (4 – link the fourteen years to the nineteen-second rhythm).

Question 5

Model answer (226 words, inside 200-250):
The writer builds the scene from the senses rather than from events. The wind is “flat and cold”, and it carries the smell of salt under the door, so the reader feels the night before anything happens; the verb “pushed” gives the weather a will of its own and makes the house feel small. The logbooks are described through touch – a thumb along the spines, skin that “remembered the pattern” – which quietly shows a girl raised by the job rather than told about it. The strongest effect is the lamp: “every nineteen seconds the kitchen wall went white” is a mechanical, countable rhythm that measures fourteen years of waiting, and the repeated number turns patience into something almost involuntary. Because the narrator has counted that rhythm since childhood, the final sentence, in which she already knows who is calling at two in the morning, feels inevitable rather than surprising; the reader is placed inside a life in which the phone call was always going to come. The writer never names the feeling. The routine, the counting and the half-answered telephone line do that work, and the restraint is exactly what makes the ending land. A candidate who only labels these details as “imagery” or “personification” stops short of the marks, because the examiner is looking for the effect on the reader, sentence by sentence.
Mark points: naming a device is not enough; name the word, then its effect (10: R1 accurate quotation, R2 implicit meaning, R4 effect on the reader).

Question 6

Model answer (letter, 262 words, inside 250-300):
A letter to the editor of the local paper: I am writing as a member of the repair club at Riverside Secondary. Last year we mended 214 items and kept around 380 kilograms of metal and plastic out of the landfill, and we did it in three hours a month, on the first Saturday, in the school hall. Our club is not a charity for old kettles. It is a workshop where students learn to look at a broken object and ask what still works, and that is a habit our city needs far more than another leaflet about recycling. Ms Chan, who runs the club, promises callers only that they will leave knowing more than they came with. I would put that promise in front of any slogan, because it changes what a household does next Saturday rather than what it feels about the planet. I accept that a bench, tools and storage are not free, and that schools already crowd their timetables. The answer is not to fund everything at once. Let the council pay for the tools, let each school find one member of staff to open the door, and let the students run the rest; our club has shown that this costs less than the equipment it saves. If your readers want to help, they can write to their own school and ask one question: when is the hall free? I have attached our repair log for the year, and I would gladly show your reporter what a dead kettle sounds like when it comes back to life.
Mark points: the 10 reading marks depend on accurate use of the text (214 items, 380 kilograms, three hours a month, Ms Chan’s promise); the 10 writing marks depend on letter form, register and a clear call to action.

Question 1

Answer: supporters – pupils buy sugary drinks because they are the only thing within a two-minute walk, and a student-run stall teaches pricing, stock control and hygiene (2); opponents – the machines pay for three sports scholarships a year, and a stall would need staffing at break times when those students are meant to be rehearsing (3). Both sides must be anchored in the text, not in the candidate’s own opinion.

Question 2

Answer plan (the full answer is a 250-350 word report):
Directed writing plan (report to the school council, about 250-350 words): (1) Purpose – recommend that the machines stay but the water station is added. (2) Paragraph 1: state the decision and the reason. (3) Paragraph 2: use the supporters’ point that pupils buy what is within a two-minute walk, then add the hospitality class’s teaching value. (4) Paragraph 3: concede the opponents’ point about the three sports scholarships and answer it – a stall staffed on a rota by the same class, priced to cover its own stock, protects the funding and the rehearsals. (5) Paragraph 4: recommend a one-term trial with a written review. Opening line: “This report recommends that the council keep the vending machines for one more year while adding a free water station at each entrance.”
Mark points: 10 reading marks for using the text (two-minute walk, three scholarships, rehearsal time); 25 writing marks for report form (audience, paragraphs, recommendation), consistent register, accuracy and vocabulary.

Question 3

Model demonstration (opening and closing of descriptive title (a); a full answer is 350-450 words):
Section B composition titles offered in this paper: (a) descriptive – “The room after everyone has left”; (b) descriptive – “A market at six in the morning”; (c) narrative – “The morning the water stopped”; (d) narrative – “What I found in the lost property box”. Model opening (descriptive, about 350-450 words in full): The hall after a concert keeps the shape of what has just left it. Chairs stand in loose ranks, each one still carrying a jacket’s ghost, and the floor holds a constellation of dropped tickets that nobody stopped for. The stage lights cool from white to a dull amber, and in that light the piano looks like furniture rather than an instrument. A caretaker drags a bin along the aisle and the wheels complain on every joint of the parquet. Somewhere behind the curtain a broom keeps time. I walk the rows and pick up what the audience did not want: a paper cup, a pencil, a programme folded into a fan. Closing line: An hour ago this room was one noise; now it is three hundred seats, and every one of them is cold.
Mark points: descriptive writing earns marks through concrete sensory detail and imagery (W3, W4); narrative writing needs a clear timeline and a turn (W2); both need accuracy (W5). Empty adjectives earn nothing.