No matter which exam board students take the GCSE English Language exam with, they will have to sit a paper that presents two non-fiction texts or 'items' which they will be questioned on and asked to compare in some way. Geoff Barton's 'Comprehension to GCSE' is a book that presents a collection of paired texts under different genres autobiography, reportage, campaign ads, travel writing amongst others and gives questions of the type that would be set in an exam. The questions that require fuller answers carrying between four and eight marks are followed by advice to show students what kind of information to look for in the text and how to structure a well-written response.

Taking the Samaritans campaign ad as an example, the preliminary advice suggests looking at different types of advertisements on television as well as in newspapers and magazines and trying to critically analyse the techniques that advertisers use. Students then have to read two advertisements for the Samaritans that appeared in newspapers in 1997, and they are asked to think while they read about what the main message is, who it is aimed at and what it tries to persuade people to do. The advertisement covers one whole page with a photograph of a young woman smiling followed by two columns of text in a small font; on the left-hand side there is a slogan. The text is reproduced in a larger font on a separate page for easier reading.

On the next page is a series of questions that focus on the advertisement. As a general rule, the first two or three questions in Section A require straightforward answers based on fact. Here, the first question asks the student to choose one of four phrases that best describes the meaning of the slogan 'We'll go through it with you', which appears at the foot of the advertisement. Question two requires the students to explain in their own words what the headline 'Sometimes it's easier to talk to someone you don't like' means. The third question asks the students to identify the reasons why 'someone might not want to discuss a problem with a close friend or a member of the family'.

Section B is composed of questions that require fully detailed answers for which between four and eight marks would be awarded. For the Samaritans advertisement, the first question in this section asks 'How well does the layout of the advertisement add to its effect?' The book gives a few lines of advice after each question in Section B, and for this one it asks students

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