Question 2 Practise

‘Hermit’ is the negative noun that is used as the opening word in the headline. At the start of the article we are introduced to the focal point of the piece. A hermit is someone who lives in solitude in deprived living standards. However a hermit is also a hummingbird which evokes connotations of freedom and free spirit. This is shown through the fact that it has no commitments therefore it can fly and nest wherever it wants to. On the other hand, a Hummingbird was named for its sound and is recognised for its call. This differs from the Hermit in source 2 because he is notorious for his silence and his thefts were recognised after they were committed.
Christopher Knight doesn’t have the same options as the average person. This gives the impression that he is confined to the woods through the adjective ‘caught’. This infers that he is trapped and has no easy way of getting out of the situation he is in. Another connotation of the word ‘caught’ is that you have done something that you shouldn’t be doing which suggests that the person in the article has done something wrong before you have even read the text.
The fact that the hermit has been living in the woods for 27 years emphasises the fact that this is not usually a normally thing to do. ’27 years’ suggests that this is information is accurate because it includes facts in the article to ensure that it catches the readers eye with shocking facsts. Also normally a sane person would not live in the woods for 27 years so this infers that the hermit must be mentally ill or wanting to hide from something otherwise this would not happen.
In the picture you can see that there are cooking stoves outside what appears to be a tent which has been set up like a camp. This suggests that whoever is staying in the tent is very familiar with where they are living because it looks lived in and like they use it a lot because they have brought all the correct utensils to provide for themselves. The fact that there are cooking stoves also suggests that the person that owns the tent has lived there for a long time because it looks they are well prepared and know what they are doing. This emphasises the fact that the hermit has been living like this for 27 years because you can almost imagine them sitting there and cooking a meal every night using the cooking stoves, it makes the article more believable because the reader can imagine this scenario clearly.
From the picture you can see that the camp does not look particularly clean. You can tell this because there are overfilled trash cans around and litter on the floor. This suggests that the person has been there for a long time with the amount of rubbish they have managed to pile up. Also it emphasises the fact that the person living there is a hermit because you usually associate a hermit as being dirty because they are homeless and therefore do not have a lot of money to take care of their body hygiene.
The fact that the hermit has been living in the woods suggests that he has something to hide because the woods has a sense of mystery about it because in films it is where a lot of people are murdered or go missing. It also suggest that the person is trying to hide something because usually a normal person wouldn’t live in the woods so they must be on the run from something or not wanting to be found otherwise they would not live like this.

In the text it tells us that hermit is called Christopher Knight and is thought to be responsible for more than 1,000 burglaries. Before the reader may have felt sympathy for him because they thought he was lonely on his own living in the woods but now they will have lost all that sympathy for him because of the shocking 1,000 burglaries he may be responsible for. This shows that you can’t trust everyone because your first impression of someone might be good but it doesn’t mean that they are a good person. Here the readers may be shocked at what he has done and be