Paper 1 Section A - Anthology Non-Fiction

Anthology version warning: This site teaches Issue 8 (February 2026) of the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Anthology (ISBN 978-1-446-93108-0), which Pearson publishes free as a PDF on its qualifications website. Two of the non-fiction texts in Part 1, the texts for Paper 1 Section A, are adapted versions that differ from their freely-available online originals.

1. ‘Explorers or boys messing about?’ by Steven Morris, originally published in The Guardian, 28 January 2003, and adapted for the Edexcel anthology by Pearson. Online reproductions of the Guardian original are not the anthology text.
2. ‘Young and dyslexic? You’ve got it going on.’ by Benjamin Zephaniah (1958–2023), a Guardian article of 2 October 2015 adapted from his contribution to Creative, Successful, Dyslexic (2015); adapted for the anthology with cuts and re-orderings. Zephaniah died on 7 December 2023. The anthology reproduces the text by permission of Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Always use the anthology version when answering Edexcel exam questions - examiners will mark against the anthology text, not the Guardian originals you may find on revision websites.

Other in-anthology textual differences from online sources include: Half-Caste uses Agard’s spelling ‘yu’ (not ‘you’); The Bright Lights of Sarajevo has additional stanza breaks not in Harrison’s original Guardian publication.

Anthology © Pearson Education Limited 2026. ‘Explorers, or boys messing about?’ © Guardian News & Media Ltd. ‘Young and dyslexic?’ is reproduced in the anthology by permission of Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Quotations on individual set-text pages are short fair-dealing extracts under CDPA s.30. Pearson publishes the full anthology free as a PDF on its qualifications website.