Act 1 — An Inspector Calls — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Act 1
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
The Birlings' celebration, Birling's speeches, the Inspector's arrival, Eva Smith's sacking and Sheila's confession.
Key quotations: 'pink and intimate', 'heavy-looking, rather portentous man', 'a hard-headed, practical man of business', 'unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable', 'a man has to make his own way', 'like bees in a hive', 'massiveness, solidity and purposefulness', 'But these girls aren't cheap labour', 'I'll never, never do it again to anybody'.
The doorbell that interrupts Birling's speech, and dramatic irony for a 1945 audience.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
