The War of the Worlds exam question — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
The War of the Worlds exam question
What you need to know
How Eduqas's 19th-century prose question works: one essay on a character or theme, starting from a printed extract and covering the whole novel and its contexts, for 40 marks.
How to plan and write the answer, using The War of the Worlds as the worked example, with a model answer and commentary.
A question set out as Eduqas sets it, with its wording, its three bullet points and its marks.
Component 2 Section B: one question on the novel studied, closed book, about 45 minutes of the paper's 2 hours 30 minutes, worth 40 marks, with AO1, AO2 and AO3 equally weighted and no marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar.
The extract as a starting point, not the task: a few precise details from it, used where they fit the argument, and most of the answer on the beginning, middle and end of the novel.
Planning in a few minutes: five or six key stages of the novel that fit the question's character or theme, each with a short quotation learned by heart.
Context woven into the argument, such as imperialism, Darwin and late Victorian science, in the same sentences as the evidence, never as a separate paragraph.
The worked example: the 2025 question on how the narrator is presented as important to the novel as a whole, with the extract from Book One, Chapter 13, in which he drifts down the Thames, sick and alone, after the battle at Shepperton.
A model answer of about 800 words, with its extract printed, that moves from 'I was a battleground of fear and curiosity' and 'I wanted to be in at the death' through 'What good is religion if it collapses under calamity?' and 'I stood my trial, my only trial' to 'an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind'.
