Past areas of interest

As you know, this is a new paper; there have, in fact, only been two sittings of this paper thus far.  The most recent was in January.  So June is really a good one to be sitting, after all they do say "the third time's a charm".
Whatever you do you must revise whenever you can.  Map out the available time you have and plan your subject study around this.  When I was sitting my GCSEs I mapped out the three weeks beforehand and divided the day into 5-8 hours depending on what I wanted to look at on those days.  If I had a lot of reading planned then I would work a longer day.  Whenever I did work I committed myself to 45 minutes, with 15 minutes off in between.  You must be strict in this regard.  Abiding by a set routine will make things easier rather than just doing it whenever you feel like.

In the past the exam board have covered the following areas:

1. Extreme sports and how they are a menace/dangerous
2. Unusual or interesting travel experiences
3. Leisure facilities in your area and their suitability for young people and families.
4. A discussion on whether kids these days have it all too easy.

The exam board will always find something to provoke your imagination: they are looking for imagination.  One candidate while writing about dangerous sports argued that it could be said all sports carry an element of danger and moved into a discussion on ballet.  They were awarded highly for the flexibility of their argument.  Some candidates took on the persona of a base jumper or extreme sports junkie, however as this is a non-fiction paper, examiners were not fooled and did not appreciate the blatant fictionalisation by candidates.  Neither did they appreciate the use of made up data/statistics.  This is a dangerous area so be very careful when quoting figures.  If you really must quote figures to strengthen your argument then make them reasonably believable and give them some thought: I would recommend you steer clear of this area however as it only invites the examiner to doubt the sincerity of your discussion/case/argument.

So, what might they ask you to look at this time?  Who knows!  I certainly don't, but I can suggest some areas of interest (this does not mean they will come up).
Animal Cruelty
Climate Change
Rising Fuel Costs
Abortion
The Act of Remembrance (in regard to remembering and respecting people who have died for this country)
The Entertainment Industry
Bullying
Protecting Areas of Special Scientific Interest, or Beauty Spots
The Quality of Food in Schools
Litter in the Local Area
The Olympics: Welcoming Tourists/Representing the Nation
The Importance of the Arts (Theatre, Cinema, Opera, Sculpture, Oil, Watercolour etc...)

If you're not sure about how to revise for this section then read up the topics above, research what others have to say about these areas and more importantly how do they express their opinions?

Oh, and one last thing: don't over use the good ol' rhetorical question!

The articles below will help if you use them to identify how they structure their discussion, how they persuade you to their point of view and how they employ language techniques.  Who know, you may enjoy reading them too.

Nuts to your red meat reproaches

Eating too much red meat may well be a bad move, but it's the knock-on effects of such research I worry about

Nicholas Lezard
The Guardian

The news that eating a lot of red meat regularly is bad for you in the long term is not exactly news; yet the recent announcement of a study by the Harvard School of Medicine, in which the health and diets of over 120,000 healthcare professionals were tracked over 28 years, seems to have made a bigger noise than usual.
True, the figures look scary: adding a single portion of red meat to one's daily diet, they say, increases the risk of dying by 13%. Make that processed red meat – bacon, say – and the figure rises to 20%.
Of course, the typical response to this is coloured by an understandable innumeracy. We are not, in the digested reports, being given the figures behind these percentages; so while the extremely casual reader may erroneously take away the information that eating a portion of bacon a day gives you a one in five chance of dying that very day, the reality is rather less alarming. It means that if 1,000 non-red-meat-eaters are going to die prematurely over a given period, then 1,130 red-meat-eaters will. Or 1,200 charcuterie fans.
This is, however, enough for some people. Lean meat can still be eaten as part of a healthy diet, says the British Heart Foundation, begrudgingly, although the Harvard researcher who addressed the World at One said that we had better not eat more than two or three portions of red meat a week.
One hesitates before piping up in the face of such informed opinion (although the survey does not seem to factor in the circumstances the meat was raised in, the other lifestyle habits of those surveyed, where they lived or any of the other variables that might have had some bearing on the data), and indeed the spectacle of defiant carnivores insisting on their rights is not, on the face of it, an edifying one. Nor is one inclined to take everything declared by the Meat Advisory Panel – a group of doctors funded by meat producers, who, possibly coincidentally, have taken issue with the study – at face value. But then again, there is something dispiriting about hearing the words "fish, chicken or nuts" brought together as a list of proteins sanctioned and blessed by the authorities as safe to eat. (It calls to mind, unfairly perhaps, the contents of a particularly uninspiring menu.)
The problem with all this is that – let's give Harvard the benefit of the doubt here, and assume their conclusions are correct – while it is all about helping us make more informed choices about what we eat, it is also the thin end of a very nasty wedge separating us from our own system of healthcare. Already there are NHS trusts making noises about barring treatment to smokers and the overweight (whose taxes, presumably, do not contribute to the exchequer in the same way slim non-smokers' do); it will not be long before the disapproving gaze falls upon imprudent eaters of red meat.
And there will be the usual depressing knock-on effects. One can, of course, still prepare and eat anything one likes, but the usual crew of cowardly cranks interested in not only, in George Orwell's resonant phrase, adding five years on to the life of their carcasses, but also inflicting their regime upon others, will be serving us either chicken, fish, or nuts at their dreary dinner parties, or, if we are really lucky, a very small portion of grilled red meat, with all the fat cut off. (Of course, a perfectly cooked chateaubriand steak has no fat on it, and should be finished off under the grill, but then it should also be slathered in unctuous, yolky Béarnaise sauce, and somehow I don't really see the good people of the British Heart Foundation endorsing such a dish.) Give me a stern vegetarian with strong social and ethical principles against the raising and eating of livestock any day of the week, rather than this meek and wowserish approach to eating, and to life.

The poor: always with us, necessarily not us

The poor are just people without enough money. But a 'culture of poverty' gives the affluent a reason to blame them for it

Barbara Ehrenreich
The Guardian

It's been exactly 50 years since Americans, or at least the non-poor among them, "discovered" poverty, thanks to Michael Harrington's engaging book The Other America. If this discovery now seems a little overstated, like Columbus's "discovery" of America, it was because the poor, according to Harrington, were so "hidden" and "invisible" that it took a crusading leftwing journalist to ferret them out.
Harrington's book jolted a nation that then prided itself on its classlessness and even fretted about the spirit-sapping effects of "too much affluence". He estimated that one quarter of the population lived in poverty – inner-city blacks, Appalachian whites, farm workers, and elderly Americans among them. We could no longer boast, as President Nixon had done in his "kitchen debate" with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow just three years earlier, about the splendors of American capitalism.
At the same time that it delivered its gut punch, The Other America also offered a view of poverty that seemed designed to comfort the already comfortable. The poor were different from the rest of us, it argued, radically different, and not just in the sense that they were deprived, disadvantaged, poorly housed, or poorly fed. They felt different, too, thought differently, and pursued lifestyles characterized by shortsightedness and intemperance. As Harrington wrote:

"There is … a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a worldview of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society."

Harrington did such a good job of making the poor seem "other" that when I read his book in 1963, I did not recognize my own forbears and extended family in it. All right, some of them did lead disorderly lives by middle-class standards, involving drinking, brawling, and out-of-wedlock babies. But they were also hardworking and, in some cases, fiercely ambitious – qualities that Harrington seemed to reserve for the economically privileged.
According to him, what distinguished the poor was their unique "culture of poverty", a concept he borrowed from anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who had derived it from his study of Mexican slum-dwellers. The culture of poverty gave The Other America a trendy academic twist, but it also gave the book a conflicted double message: "we" – the always presumptively affluent readers – needed to find some way to help the poor, but we also needed to understand that there was something wrong with them, something that could not be cured by a straightforward redistribution of wealth. Think of the earnest liberal who encounters a panhandler, is moved to pity by the man's obvious destitution, but refrains from offering a quarter – since the hobo might, after all, spend the money on booze.
In his defense, Harrington did not mean that poverty was caused by what he called the "twisted" proclivities of the poor. But he certainly opened the floodgates to that interpretation. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan – a sometime liberal and one of Harrington's drinking companions at the famed White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village – blamed inner-city poverty on what he saw as the shaky structure of the "Negro family", clearing the way for decades of victim-blaming. A few years after the Moynihan Report, Harvard urbanologist Edward C Banfield, who was to go on to serve as an advisor to Ronald Reagan, felt free to claim that:

"The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment … Impulse governs his behavior … He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless … [He] has a feeble, attenuated sense of self."

In the "hardest cases", Banfield opined, the poor might need to be cared for in "semi-institutions … and to accept a certain amount of surveillance and supervision from a semi-social-worker-semi-policeman."
By the Reagan era, the "culture of poverty" had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused, not by low wages or a lack of jobs, but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to "defer gratification", or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money. In fact, Charles Murray argued, in his 1984 book Losing Ground, any attempt to help the poor with their material circumstances would only have the unexpected consequence of deepening their depravity.
So it was in a spirit of righteousness and even compassion that Democrats and Republicans joined together to reconfigure social programs to cure, not poverty, but the "culture of poverty". In 1996, the Clinton administration enacted the "One Strike" rule banning anyone who committed a felony from public housing. A few months later, welfare was replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which in its current form makes cash assistance available only to those who have jobs or are able to participate in government-imposed "workfare".
In a further nod to "culture of poverty" theory, the original welfare reform bill appropriated $250m over five years for "chastity training" for poor single mothers. (This bill, it should be pointed out, was signed by Bill Clinton.)
Even today, more than a decade later and four years into a severe economic downturn, as people continue to slide into poverty from the middle classes, the theory maintains its grip. If you're needy, you must be in need of correction, the assumption goes, so TANF recipients are routinely instructed in how to improve their attitudes, and applicants for a growing number of safety-net programs are subjected to drug-testing. Lawmakers in 23 states are considering testing people who apply for such programs as job training, food stamps, public housing, welfare, and home heating assistance. And on the theory that the poor are likely to harbor criminal tendencies, applicants for safety net programs are increasingly subjected to finger-printing and computerized searches for outstanding warrants.
Unemployment, with its ample opportunities for slacking off, is another obviously suspect condition, and last year, 12 states considered requiring pee tests as a condition for receiving unemployment benefits. Both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have suggested drug testing as a condition for all government benefits, presumably including social security. If granny insists on handling her arthritis with marijuana, she may have to starve.
What would Michael Harrington make of the current uses of the "culture of poverty" theory he did so much to popularize? I worked with him in the 1980s, when we were co-chairs of Democratic Socialists of America, and I suspect he'd have the decency to be chagrined, if not mortified. In all the discussions and debates I had with him, he never said a disparaging word about the down-and-out or, for that matter, uttered the phrase "the culture of poverty". Maurice Isserman, Harrington's biographer, told me that he'd probably latched onto it in the first place only because "he didn't want to come off in the book sounding like a stereotypical Marxist agitator stuck-in-the-thirties."
The ruse – if you could call it that – worked: Michael Harrington wasn't red-baited into obscurity. In fact, his book became a bestseller and an inspiration for President Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty". But he had fatally botched the "discovery" of poverty. What affluent Americans found in his book, and in all the crude conservative diatribes that followed it, was not the poor, but a flattering new way to think about themselves – disciplined, law-abiding, sober, and focused. In other words, not poor.
Fifty years later, a new discovery of poverty is long overdue. This time, we'll have to take account not only of stereotypical Skid Row residents and Appalachians, but of foreclosed-upon suburbanites, laid-off tech workers, and America's ever-growing army of the "working poor". And if we look closely enough, we'll have to conclude that poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.

The tyranny of a dog's turds

However often you pick up your beloved pet's faeces, the hideousness of the task does not diminish

Robert Hanks
The Guardian

The Marine Conservation Society has reported a large increase in the volume of dog excrement found on British beaches wrapped in bags: for the UK as a whole, a rise of 11% in a single year, 2010 to 2011; for Scotland, the figure is 71%. From south of the border, devo max suddenly seems insufficient.
Most people's reaction to such a statistic is, I imagine, one of uncomplicated revulsion. For dog owners the thought of dog shit evokes a mixture of feelings: revulsion, naturally, but also shame, frustration, self-reproach – how did I allow myself to get into this situation? – and in the end, resignation.
For any dog owner, shit is a major issue, but even among ourselves the subject is hard to discuss. Hence the variety of language, euphemistic, infantilising or loftily medical – all the usual nonsense, plus a few dog-only ones: doggy-doo, business, mess ... This is the opposite of linguistic richness. In the park, we exchange discreet nods and unfinished sentences when an owner has not noticed their dog doing its duty – "Oh look, he's, umm ..." Then, with a display of gratitude, the owner rushes to the spot, pulls out a bag (the fancy bespoke article, lightly scented and biodegradable, or a ragged Tesco carrier), picks the stuff up, and drops it in the nearest bin.
The gratitude is real; though to non-owners it may sometimes seem that the world is drowning in turds, the imperative to pick up your dog's shit has been hammered into most dog owners. Good citizenship aside, to fail to locate your dog's excrement is a source of shame – you're making all of us look bad.
So it is that on winter evenings I find myself grubbing around in darkness, groping for a stray turd by the light of my mobile phone. Sometimes you give up on your own dog's droppings and take what you can find – there's usually something, and that way you've at least left the net level of faeces unchanged. In autumn, wet earth and piles of leaves turn the hunt into an agony; we bless the colder, drier weather which brings the tell-tale column of steam.
Alongside the gratitude to the helpful person who points out your dog's offences you might allow yourself a tiny touch of resentment: did you have to? Just once, couldn't we all pretend this never happened? For however often you pick up the shit, however much you love your dog, the hideousness of the task does not diminish. However deep the lesson of good citizenship has sunk, to walk down the street with a sack of faeces in your hand, looking for that elusive next bin, is a humiliation.
It is worth remembering how recent the whole poo-bag habit is – it is only in the last quarter-century or so that we've been picking it up and binning it. JR Ackerley's My Dog Tulip (1956), the frankest book ever written about the pleasures and pains of dog-owning. In the second chapter, "Liquids and Solids", he talks in detail about the agonies of doing your duty by your dog's bowels: finding appropriate places for them to be voided (he favoured the cemetery of Putney church – "The dead are less particular and more charitable than the living"), of circling railway stations for hours, praying that your dog will empty itself in time for you to catch a train, of your dog suddenly squatting in inappropriate places. And then he talks about walking away from the mess, leaving it on the pavement. It never crosses his mind that he could pick the stuff up. How? With what? Where would you put it? Part of me is appalled, part of me is envious: how lovely to own the dog but not its shit; how wonderful never again to feel that heavy warmth in your hand.
I join in the disgust at the bag dumpers who disfigure our beaches, but I feel compassion too. They have tried to do their bit, but at some point – why are we surprised? – shame and revulsion overcame altruism and willpower. Especially in Scotland.