H

P&N Publications
Prelim Exam for
National
Qualifications
This prelim paper should be withdrawn from candidates after the examination and any follow-up discussion of marks/grades
awarded. This is to ensure the ‘sight unseen’ status of this paper is maintained for your centre and other schools/colleges during
the diet of prelim examinations in 2015/2016.

2015/2016 English
Reading for Understanding, Analysis
and Evaluation — Text­
Duration — 1 hour 30 minutes

Total marks—30

Read the passages carefully and then attempt ALL questions, which are printed on a separate
sheet.

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 CfE Higher English—RUAE Text—2015/2016

The following two passages focus on supermarkets.

Passage 1

Read the passage below and then attempt questions 1 to 6.

In the first passage Carol Midgley, writing in The Times newspaper in October 2014, welcomes
the news that fewer people are shopping in big supermarkets.
THE END OF A WEEKLY ORDEAL
A death was announced this week. “Hooray, good riddance,” I thought when I heard—for
the deceased in question was a voracious tyrant that sapped people’s time and money and
was a monumental pain in the backside. Its name was the “Big Weekly Supermarket Shop”,
that thankless Saturday morning ritual that frayed tempers, smashed ankles with over-laden
5 trollies, encouraged overspending and waste, and symbolised a time when we, the consumers,
danced like monkeys to the supermarket giants’ tune.
The weekly supermarket shop seemed such a good idea at the time: liberating and labour-
saving. The 1950s housewife, trudging daily betwixt butcher, baker and greengrocer was
to be pitied. Get it all done in one go, you fool, even if you do sometimes require two
10 trollies, and you’ll still have more time for “leisure activities”. But, hush, the idea is dead
now. According to an industry expert, the notion that you are going to push a trolley around
a vast supermarket for a whole week’s groceries is a thing of the past. The Big Four—Tesco,
Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons—are working a template that is 20 years out of date.
As one who for years gormlessly bought in to that inane weekly ordeal, I won’t miss it: driving
15 to some soulless behemoth, staggering around the crowded aisles with a fractious child,
falling prey to the subliminal mind games of faux “cut-price” this and fake “special offer”
that, then queuing at the tills (most of which said: “Sorry: checkout closed”) and desperately
trying to pack things as they crashed in a squashed pile-up at the end of the conveyor belt.
The big weekly shop felt at times like anti-service. Everything skewed to capitalism’s
20 benefit, little for yours. The final act of contempt was the mass introduction of self-scan
tills. After we’ve shelled out £150 on goods, they want us to do their jobs for them. Yet self-
scanning has been spun, brilliantly, as if it is for our convenience, not so they can shed a few
more minimum-wage staff and push those profit margins up. Perish the thought.
Whingeing about our plentifully stocked supermarkets is, I realise, a dreadfully “first world
25 problem”. Still it’s hard not to see Tesco’s current woes—almost £1 billion has been wiped off
its market value and shares have plunged to an 11-year low—as payback for hubris and greed.
Tesco became more concerned with pleasing the markets than the customer; it took them for
granted.
But tastes and habits have been shifting for a while. A great many people still do the big
30 weekly shop, of course, but people are increasingly buying food for the evening ahead and
managing their life in a more efficient way. Lidl and Aldi bargains have helped, as have the
plethora of small, express versions of the Big Four, which have helped to cannibalise their
out-of-town cousins. And if you must do a big shop, why not do it online, make them do all
the work? Wasteful offers are easier to resist when they’re not winking on the shelf in front
35 of you.
There’s a reason why supermarkets are called cathedrals of consumerism. Once trapped in
there for up to an hour you are effectively a lab rat manipulated by the planted stimuli of
fresh bread smells, the airy “decompression zone” at the entrance to promote relaxation,
the wobbling signs hanging from the ceiling (because we are more likely to notice objects in
40 our peripheral vision if they move), the fact that essentials such as bread and milk are buried
deep within the store, the “half-price” wines that turn out to be nothing of the sort.

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So exhausting was the experience, especially when punctuated with piped muzak, that
you bought more than you needed to justify the misery of going there. It encouraged
excess. But once home, many of those fresh purchases quickly went out of date or unused,
45 the special-offer bumper bag of courgettes quietly putrefying to mush in the fridge. Nothing
induces feelings of self-loathing like binning food when elsewhere children starve, so we have
changed our ways. The amount of food we throw away has fallen by 21 per cent in the last
five years.
It seems obvious that buying modest amounts when you need them is the more intelligent
50 way to live. In urban areas there are so many small express stores now that buy-as-you-use is
not even a chore. Huge out-of-town buildings with their key-cutting services and photo-labs
can’t be written off yet, of course, but they do belong to the old world. Doing that big weekly
shop with its associated stresses would now feel like a weird anachronism. I’m afraid its death
leaves my eyes tear-free.

Passage 2

Read the passage below and attempt question 7. While reading, you may wish to make
notes on the main ideas and/or highlight key points in the passage.
In the second passage Julie Burchill, writing in The Guardian newspaper, declares her love of
supermarkets.

WHY I LOVE TESCO

I recently read an article by a well-known novelist about the joy of small shops and the evil
of supermarkets. I read it with bemusement, amusement and amazement. She asserted that
when she shops she wants “passion, commitment—something more than the transaction”,
because “I’m not here to make a profit for somebody who couldn’t care less about what they
5 are selling, about how it is made, or about me”.

Maybe I’m lucky, but personally I find I get all the validation, passion and commitment I need
from my family, friends, religion and voluntary work; that I might go looking for proof of my
worth over the wet fish counter seems quite eye-wateringly daft. But then, as with so many
of those who idealise small shops and demonise big shops, her arguments seem to be based
10 around prejudice and superstition rather than fact.

Though they use the word “pleasure” a lot, I can’t help thinking that there is something
rather sad about people who bang on about the joys of “slow shopping”. This always seems to
mark out a dull and dreary nostalgia-hound with too much time on their hands and a morbid
fear of modernity. A Tesco-hater in my local paper recently fumed, for instance, that “Tesco
15 is rampaging through this town like Attila the Hun”.

I love Tesco; here in my town we have six of the beauties. Of course the less unhinged among
us will always go for speed and convenience over drudgery and difficulty, and we can also
grasp that the very same small shopkeepers who get into a sweat about Tesco didn’t go into
their racket to make the world a better place, despite their mealy-mouthed protestations
20 that they are working for the benefit of the “community”. They chose to go into their kind
of business because they are capitalists who wanted to make a profit—as did the man who
started Tesco.

[Turn over

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Don’t get me wrong; small local shops are all very well, abroad, where it’s sunny and one
doesn’t have to stagger through the streets in the pissing rain for six months of the year in
25 search of the perfect croissant. But there can be few humdrum feelings more satisfying than
knowing that one has bagged a week’s worth of shopping in 45 minutes, and that one is now
free to party the remaining days away and sleep in late every morning, safe from the fear
that the cupboard is bare. If one can also find cheap books, CDs and pet insurance under the
same roof, so much the better.

30 I love the lights and rush and exhilaration of speeding round the supermarket; let saddoes
dawdle their day away over errands if they want to, but some of us love the buzz of getting
things done quickly so one can then move on and do something one loves, be it sex, conversation
or lazing away the day on the sofa with a good book. People who are against supermarkets
are the sort of people who 50 years ago would have been against labour-saving devices on the
35 grounds that they might conceivably give women time to put their feet up, have a cup of tea
and watch daytime telly for half an hour.

I am neither old nor poor, but I am able to put myself in the shoes of people to whom
supermarkets have proved nothing but a blessing. This is probably because I have no fear
of the modern world, a fear that runs like mad mercury through those who celebrate small
40 shops. But it is the modern world which has given so many of us the right to follow our hearts,
live our dreams and hold fast to our freedom. Just compare the faces of the people I see
shopping in my local pedestrianised parade of small shops with the ones in my local big,
beautiful supermarket. One lot tramp from shop to shop in the teeming rain, weighed down
under their shopping bags; the others stroll in the warm, dry brightness of the supermarket.

[END OF TEXT]

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