GCSEEnglish LiteratureWJEC EduqasExam QuestionsPost-1914 Prose/DramaLord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies (WJEC Eduqas GCSE English Literature): Exam Questions

Exam code: C720

4 hours93 questions

40 marks

Write about Jack in Lord of the Flies and how Golding presents his importance to the novel as a whole.

In your response you should:

refer to the extract and the novel as a whole
show your understanding of characters and events in the novel.

5 of this question’s marks are allocated for accuracy in spelling, punctuation and the use of vocabulary and sentence structures.

Jack was bent double. He was down like a sprinter, his nose only a few inches from the humid earth. The tree trunks and the creepers that festooned them lost themselves in a green dusk thirty feet above him; and all about was the undergrowth. There was only the faintest indication of a trail here; a cracked twig and what might be the impression of one side of a hoof. He lowered his chin and stared at the traces as though he would force them to speak to him. Then dog-like, uncomfortably on all fours yet unheeding his discomfort, he stole forward five yards and stopped. Here was loop of creeper with a tendril pendant from a node. The tendril was polished on the underside; pigs, passing through the loop, brushed it with their bristly hide.

Jack crouched with his face a few inches away from this clue, then stared forward into the semi-darkness of the undergrowth. His sandy hair, considerably longer than it had been when they dropped in, was lighter now; and his bare back was a mass of dark freckles and peeling sunburn. A sharpened stick about five feet long trailed from his right hand; and except for a pair of tattered shorts held up by his knife-belt he was naked. He closed his eyes, raised his head and breathed in gently with flared nostrils, assessing the current of warm air for information. The forest and he were very still.

At length he let out his breath in a long sigh and opened his eyes. They were bright blue, eyes that in this frustration seemed bolting and nearly mad. He passed his tongue across dry lips and scanned the uncommunicative forest. Then again he stole forward and cast this way and that over the ground.

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40 marks

Write about the breakdown of civilisation in Lord of the Flies and how Golding presents this at different points in the novel.

In your response you should:

refer to the extract and the novel as a whole
show your understanding of characters and events in the novel.

5 of this question’s marks are allocated for accuracy in spelling, punctuation and the use of vocabulary and sentence structures.

The hunters were looking uneasily at the sky, flinching from the stroke of the drops. A wave of restlessness set the boys swaying and moving aimlessly. The flickering light became brighter and the blows of the thunder were only just bearable. The littluns began to run about, screaming.

Jack leapt on to the sand.

‘Do our dance! Come on! Dance!’
He ran stumbling through the thick sand to the open space of rock beyond the fire.
Between the flashes of lightning the air was dark and terrible; and the boys followed him, clamorously. Roger became the pig, grunting and charging at Jack, who side-stepped. The hunters took their spears, the cooks took spits, and the rest clubs of fire-wood. While Roger mimed the terror of the pig, the littluns ran and jumped on the outside of the circle. Piggy and Ralph, under the threat of the sky, found themselves eager to take a place in this demented but partly secure society. They were glad to touch the brown backs of the fence that hemmed in the terror and made it governable.

‘Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!’

The movement became regular while the chant lost its first superficial excitement and began to beat like a steady pulse. Roger ceased to be a pig and became a hunter, so that the centre of the ring yawned emptily. Some of the littluns started a ring on their own; and the complementary circles went round and round as though repetition would achieve safety of itself. There was the throb and stamp of a single organism.

The dark sky was shattered by a blue-white scar. An instant later the noise was on them like the blow of a gigantic whip. The chant rose in a tone in agony.

‘Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!’

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40 marks

Write about some of the violent events in Lord of the Flies. How are they important to the novel as a whole?

In your response you should:

refer to the extract and the novel as a whole
show your understanding of characters and events in the novel

5 of this question’s marks are allocated for accuracy in spelling, punctuation and the use of vocabulary and sentence structures.

Ralph heard the great rock long before he saw it. He was aware of a jolt in the earth that came to him through the soles of his feet, and the breaking sound of stones at the top of the cliff. Then the monstrous red thing bounded across the neck and he flung himself flat while the tribe shrieked. The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. Piggy, saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, travelled through the air sideways from the rock, turning over as he went. The rock bounded twice and was lost in the forest. Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across that square, red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy’s arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig’s after it has been killed. Then the sea breathed again in a long slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone.

This time the silence was complete. Ralph’s lips formed a word but no sound came.
Suddenly Jack bounded out from the tribe and began screaming wildly. “See? See? That’s what you’ll get! I meant that! There isn’t a tribe for you any more! The conch is gone–”

He ran forward, stooping.

“I’m Chief!”

Viciously, with full intention, he hurled his spear at Ralph. The point tore the skin and flesh over Ralph’s ribs, then sheared off and fell in the water. Ralph stumbled, feeling not pain but panic, and the tribe, screaming now like the Chief, began to advance. Another spear, a bent one that would not fly straight, went past his face and one fell from on high where Roger was. The twins lay hidden behind the tribe and the anonymous devils’ faces swarmed across the neck. Ralph turned and ran. A great noise as of sea-gulls rose behind him. He obeyed an instinct that he did not know he possessed and swerved over the open space so that the spears went wide. He saw the headless body of the sow and jumped in time. Then he was crashing through foliage and small boughs and was hidden by the forest.

The Chief stopped by the pig, turned and held up his hands.

“Back! Back to the fort!”

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40 marks

Read the following extract from Chapter 1 of Lord of the Flies and then answer the question that follows.

‘If it really is an island—’
‘What’s that?’
Ralph had stopped smiling and was pointing into the lagoon. Something creamy lay among the ferny weeds.
‘A stone.’
‘No. A shell.’
Suddenly Piggy was a-bubble with decorous excitement.
‘S’right. It’s a shell. I seen one like that before. On someone’s back wall. A conch he called it. He used to blow it and then his mum would come. It’s ever so valuable—’
Near to Ralph’s elbow, a palm sapling leaned out over the lagoon. Indeed, the weight was already pulling a lump from the poor soil and soon it would fall. He tore out the stem and began to poke about in the water, while the brilliant fish flicked away on this side and that. Piggy leaned dangerously.
‘Careful! You’ll break it—’
‘Shut up.’
Ralph spoke absently. The shell was interesting and pretty and a worthy plaything: but the vivid phantoms of his day-dream still interposed between him and Piggy, who in this context was an irrelevance. The palm sapling, bending, pushed the shell across the weeds. Ralph used one hand as a fulcrum and pressed down with the other till the shell rose, dripping, and Piggy could make a grab.
Now the shell was no longer a thing seen but not to be touched, Ralph too became excited. Piggy babbled: ‘—a conch; ever so expensive. I bet if you wanted to buy one, you’d have to pay pounds and pounds and pounds—he had it on his garden wall, and my auntie—’
Ralph took the shell from Piggy and a little water ran down his arm. In colour the shell was deep cream, touched here and there with fading pink. Between the point, worn away into a little hole, and the pink lips of the mouth, lay eighteen inches of shell with a slight spiral twist and covered with a delicate, embossed pattern. Ralph shook sand out of the deep tube.
‘—moo-ed like a cow,’ he said. ‘He had some white stones too, an’ a bird cage with a green parrot. He didn’t blow the white stones, of course, an’ he said—’
Piggy paused for breath and stroked the glistening thing that lay in Ralph’s hands.
‘Ralph!’
Ralph looked up.
‘We can use this to call the others. Have a meeting. They’ll come when they hear us—’
He beamed at Ralph.
‘That was what you meant, didn’t you? That’s why you got the conch out of the water?’

Write about Piggy in Lord of the Flies and how Golding presents his importance to the novel as a whole.

In your response you should:

refer to the extract and the novel as a whole
show your understanding of characters and events in the novel. [40]

5 of this question's marks are allocated for accuracy in spelling, punctuation and the use of vocabulary and sentence structures.

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