GCE Advanced Level - StudyGuide.PK

Question 4Eine deutsche StadtThere were two good essays, one dealing with Bremen, the other with Stuttgart. Both gave extensivehistorical and geographical details and were written in excellent German.Question 5Schulbildung und QualifikationenA small number of essays on this theme - all took the view that education means more than collectingqualifications.Question 6Naturwissenschaftliche Forschung und GenmanipulationThe candidates who chose this option needed to command some quite technical vocabulary and scientificknowledge. As with earlier titles, candidates had clearly benefited from time for research, and all the essaysseen were well documented and in control of appropriate terminology.Paper 9099/05Texts/Thematic StudiesGeneral commentsThe entry numbers for this paper were extremely small, but overall the performance was quite good. Themajority of the essays showed evidence of detailed knowledge of the texts chosen and a reasonablecapacity to express thoughts and arguments in clear, if unsophisticated, German. A greater proportion ofcandidates chose to answer questions from Section B, Thematic Studies, which gave scope for addressingwider issues and displaying a more varied knowledge of German texts. The majority tended to choose theirsupplementary material from newspaper or magazine articles rather than other works of literature; theseworks were mainly well integrated into the argument, particularly in the case of those candidates who choseQuestion 7 (d) (see below). Unfortunately, a small proportion of candidates seemed unaware of the factthat they had to have read supplementary material or, having read other texts, that they needed to do morethan mention the names of the texts without further reference to their content. Cases where nosupplementary material was used appeared to be linked to specific Centres rather than to individualcandidates within a Centre. It is important that Centres instruct their candidates in the examinationrequirements, as a candidate who fails to comply with the rubric is unable to achieve top marks, howevergood the essay as a whole may be.Comments on specific questionsAs stated above, the number of candidates for this paper was small, therefore certain essay questions,particularly in Section A, were not attempted by any candidate.Section A: TEXTSQuestion 1Andersch: Sansibar oder der letzte GrundOnly one candidate attempted this question, choosing to answer the context question, (a).Question 2Brecht: Der gute Mensch von Sezuan(a)Two candidates chose this question. Both found it rather difficult and tended to become entangledin the complexities of the story in their attempts to explain Brecht’s Weltanschauung.39