Practice IB English A Lang & Lit Topic Writing Your English Lang & Lit Paper 1 Essay with authentic exam-style questions for both SL and HL students. This question bank focuses on the exact syllabus content for Writing Your English Lang & Lit Paper 1 Essay and mirrors Paper 1, 2 style where relevant.
Get instant solutions, detailed explanations, and build confidence with questions aligned to IB examiner expectations.
The following extract is from the Thornfield Eco website, a sustainability consultancy based in England.
In what ways does the text use language to construct an image of authority and credibility?
How does the comic use visual and verbal features to educate and motivate the community about composting?
The following extract is from The National Post, a national newspaper published in Canada.
1 state of emergency: a formal declaration by a government authority that activates special powers and resources to respond to a crisis; in B.C., it allows the province to commandeer equipment, enforce evacuations, and access federal support without normal approval processes.
2 fire behaviour: the manner in which a wildfire ignites, spreads, and consumes fuel; influenced by wind, humidity, temperature, and terrain; unpredictable fire behaviour poses the greatest risk to firefighters and communities.
3 anomaly: something that deviates significantly from what is standard or expected; scientists use the term to distinguish an unusual event from a new normal pattern.
4 drought: a prolonged period of abnormally low rainfall leading to water shortages, dry soil, and increased fire risk; measured in Canada against long-term precipitation averages.
5 emissions / prescribed burning: emissions refers to greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere through human activity; prescribed burning is the controlled use of fire by land managers to reduce accumulated dry vegetation and lower the risk of uncontrolled wildfire.
In what ways does the article use language and structure to convey the scale and urgency of British Columbia's 2024 wildfire crisis?
The following advertisement is taken from meridianbank.co.uk, the website of Meridian Bank plc, as part of a rebranding campaign launched in 2024.
1 hidden fees / savings rate / financial product: hidden fees are charges not prominently disclosed at the point of sale; a savings rate is the annual interest paid on deposited funds; a
financial product is any service or instrument offered by a bank, such as a loan, mortgage, or savings account.
2 small print: terms and conditions written in reduced font size, often containing important limitations or exclusions to the headline terms of an offer.
3 fossil fuel extraction / lending portfolio: the process of removing oil, gas, or coal from the ground for commercial use; a lending portfolio is the total collection of loans held by a bank.
4 net zero: a state in which the greenhouse gases emitted by an organisation are balanced by an equivalent amount removed from the atmosphere.
5 performance bonuses / FSCS / community lending: financial payments to staff linked to sales targets; FSCS (Financial Services Compensation Scheme) protects customer deposits if a bank
fails; community lending refers to loans directed to local businesses and social organisations in under-resourced areas.
How and to what effect does the advertisement use language to reconstruct the identity of a bank, and how does it position honesty itself as a persuasive strategy?
The following extract is from Nature magazine, Careers and Community section, 3 October 2024.
1 neutrino: a subatomic particle with very small mass and no electric charge; the discovery that neutrinos have mass was a significant revision to the Standard Model of particle physics.
2 Large Hadron Collider: the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, operated by CERN near Geneva; used to collide subatomic particles at near-light speed to study fundamental physics.
3 Standard Model: the theoretical framework describing the fundamental particles and forces that make up the universe; it has been extraordinarily successful but is known to be incomplete, as it does not fully account for gravity or for the properties of neutrinos.
4 Abdus Salam: a Pakistani theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for his work on the unification of the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces; one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century physics.
How and to what effect does the text construct a tension between two different frameworks for understanding achievement and representation?