Cambridge IGCSE®
LITERATURE IN ENGLISH 0475/04
Paper 4 Unseen For examination from 2020
SPECIMEN PAPER 1 hour 15 minutes
You must answer on the enclosed answer booklet.
*0123456789*
You will need: Answer booklet (enclosed)
INSTRUCTIONS
● Answer one question: either Question 1 or Question 2.
● Follow the instructions on the front cover of the answer booklet. If you need additional answer paper,
ask the invigilator for a continuation booklet.
INFORMATION
● The total mark for this paper is 25.
● All questions are worth equal marks.
This document has 6 pages. Blank pages are indicated.
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You are advised to spend about 20 minutes reading the question paper and planning your answer.
Answer either Question 1 or Question 2.
Either
1 Read carefully the following poem. The poet is explaining to his young son why he stays up late at
night writing his poems.
How does the poet’s writing make his thoughts and feelings so vivid for you?
To help you answer this question, you might consider:
• how the poet describes his son’s experiences at the rockpool
• how he explains to his son his experience of writing
• how he connects the nature of the two experiences.
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Why Do You Stay Up So Late?
I’ll tell you, if you really want to know:
remember that day you lost two years ago
at the rockpool where you sat and played the jeweller
with all those stones you’d stolen from the shore?
Most of them went dark and nothing more,
but sometimes one would blink the secret colour
it had locked up somewhere in its stony sleep.
This is how you knew the ones to keep.
So I collect the dull things of the day
in which I see some possibility
but which are dead and which have the surprise
I don’t know, and I’ve no pool to help me tell –
so I look at them and look at them until
one thing makes a mirror in my eyes
then I paint it with the tear to make it bright.
This is why I sit up through the night.
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Or
2 Read carefully the following extract from a short story. Before this extract, Walter Henderson, an
office worker in New York, has been worried that he might lose his job. His boss, George Crowell,
calls him into his office.
How does the writer make this moment so memorable for you?
To help you answer this question, you might consider:
• how the writer builds tension between Walter and Crowell
• how he describes Walter’s return to his desk
• how he strikingly reveals Walter’s feelings.
“Pull up a chair, Walt,” he said. “Smoke?”
“No thanks.” Walter sat down and laced his fingers tight between his
knees.
Crowell shut the cigarette box without taking one for himself, pushed
it aside and leaned forward, both hands spread flat on the plate-glass top
of the desk. “Walt, I might as well give you this straight from the shoulder,”
he said, and the last shred of hope slipped away. The funny part was that
it came as a shock, even so. “Mr. Harvey and I have felt for some time
that you haven’t quite caught on to the work here, and we’ve both very
reluctantly come to the conclusion that the best thing to do, in your own
best interests as well as ours, is to let you go. Now,” he added quickly, “this
is no reflection on you personally, Walt. We do a highly specialized kind
of work here and we can’t expect everybody to stay on top of the job. In
your case particularly, we really feel you’d be happier in some organization
better suited to your—abilities.”
Crowell leaned back, and when he raised his hands their moisture left
two gray, perfect prints on the glass, like the hands of a skeleton. Walter
stared at them, fascinated, while they shriveled and disappeared.
“Well,” he said, and looked up. “You put that very nicely, George.
Thanks.”
Crowell’s lips worked into an apologetic, regular guy’s smile. “Awfully
sorry,” he said. “These things just happen.” And he began to fumble with
the knobs of his desk drawers, visibly relieved that the worst was over.
“Now,” he said, “we’ve made out a check here covering your salary
through the end of next month. That’ll give you something in the way of—
severance pay, so to speak—to tide you over until you find something.” He
held out a long envelope.
“That’s very generous,” Walter said. Then there was a silence, and
Walter realized it was up to him to break it. He got to his feet. “All right,
George. I won’t keep you.”
Crowell got up quickly and came around the desk with both hands
held out—one to shake Walter’s hand, the other to put on his shoulder
as they walked to the door. The gesture, at once friendly and humiliating,
brought a quick rush of blood to Walter’s throat, and for a terrible second
he thought he might be going to cry. “Well, boy,” Crowell said, “good luck
to you.”
“Thanks,” he said, and he was so relieved to find his voice steady that
he said it again, smiling. “Thanks. So long, George.”
There was a distance of some fifty feet to be crossed on the way
back to his cubicle, and Walter Henderson accomplished it with style.
He was aware of how trim and straight his departing shoulders looked to
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Crowell; he was aware too, as he threaded his way among desks whose
occupants either glanced up shyly at him or looked as if they’d like to, of
every subtle play of well-controlled emotion in his face. It was as if the
whole thing were a scene in a movie. The camera had opened the action
from Crowell’s viewpoint and dollied back1 to take the entire office as a
frame for Walter’s figure in lonely, stately passage; now it came in for a
long-held close-up of Walter’s face, switched to other brief views of his
colleagues’ turning heads (Joe Collins looking worried, Fred Holmes trying
to keep from looking pleased), and switched again to Walter’s viewpoint as
it discovered the plain, unsuspecting face of Mary, his secretary, who was
waiting for him at his desk with a report he had given her to type.
“I hope this is all right, Mr. Henderson.”
Walter took it and dropped it on the desk. “Forget it, Mary,” he said.
“Look, you might as well take the rest of the day off, and go see the
personnel manager in the morning. You’ll be getting a new job. I’ve just
been fired.”
1
dollied back : moved along a track (cinema term)
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BLANK PAGE
Copyright Acknowledgements:
Question 1 © Don Paterson; Why Do You Stay Up So Late; in Rain; Faber & Faber Ltd; 2010.
Question 2 © Richard Yates; A Glutton for Punishment, in The Collected Stories of Richard Yates; Vintage / Random House; 1947.
Permission to reproduce items where third-party owned material protected by copyright is included has been sought and cleared where possible. Every
reasonable effort has been made by the publisher (UCLES) to trace copyright holders, but if any items requiring clearance have unwittingly been included, the
publisher will be pleased to make amends at the earliest possible opportunity.
Cambridge Assessment International Education is part of the Cambridge Assessment Group. Cambridge Assessment is the brand name of University of
Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES), which itself is a department of the University of Cambridge.
© UCLES 2017 0475/04/SP/20
