Read Text A, The Farms Above Manila, and then answer Questions 1(a) to 1(e). (a) Give one reason why Amihan Delgado begins cutting lettuce at half past four...

This question tests the three reading skills that Paper 1 Question 1 always tests: locating explicit information, explaining meaning in your own words, and selecting and summarising material from a second text. Work through the parts in order, and notice that each part tells you exactly where to look.

1(a) Why Delgado begins cutting at half past four [1]

The answer is that by nine in the morning the roof will be too hot for her to kneel on, so the cutting has to be finished before the sun is high. [1]

The material is in paragraph 1: 'She starts at half past four because by nine the roof will be too hot to kneel on.' The word 'because' hands you the reason directly, so this is a locating question rather than a thinking question. One mark is available, so one clear reason is enough. Do not add the traffic on the expressway or the sixteen floors of concrete; those are scene-setting, not reasons for the start time.

1(b) Explaining meaning in your own words [4]

(i) 'the city exhales its heat back at the sky' (line 19) [2]

1. The concrete of the city absorbs and stores the sun's heat during the day. [1]
2. It then gives that heat off again slowly all through the night, as though the built-up city were a body breathing out, so the place never has a chance to cool. [1]

The sentence immediately before the quotation supplies both halves: 'Concrete stores heat all day and hands it back all night', and the phrase 'long after the sun has gone' fixes the release as slow and night-time. That is how you find the two separate marking points: one for the taking in of heat, one for the slow giving out. The verb 'exhales' is the metaphor you must translate, because breathing out is gradual and continuous, not sudden. A candidate who writes 'the city breathes its heat out at the sky' scores nothing, because repeating the image is not explaining it. Own-words questions credit the idea, not the vocabulary.

(ii) 'a brittle truce with the water bill' (line 31) [2]

1. The cooperative has only just managed to hold the cost of water down to a level it can live with, so growers and the water bill are not openly at war. [1]
2. That arrangement is fragile and could snap at any moment, for instance after a long dry spell or a rise in price. [1]

Two words carry the meaning. A truce is a temporary agreement to stop fighting, which implies that the two sides are still opponents; 'brittle' means hard but easily broken, so the peace is not solid. The surrounding sentences confirm this reading: 'Pumping to the sixteenth floor costs money, and so does the water itself', and the rain the growers rely on 'arrives in the wrong shape'. Take one mark for the uneasy balance and one for its fragility.

1(c) Why Engineer Yabut refused most roofs [2]

1. Wet growing medium is extremely heavy, about nine hundred kilograms for every cubic metre once it has been watered, and rain can add that load without warning: 'Growing medium that feels light and dusty in the bag weighs about nine hundred kilograms per cubic metre once it has been watered, and rain does not ask permission.' [1]
2. Most of the buildings were never designed to carry that load: 'The rest had been built to hold people and water tanks, not fields', and 'it will carry a garden only if somebody asked it to at the hour it was poured.' [1]

The instruction 'Re-read paragraph 5' restricts you to that paragraph, and the sentence 'says that the whole problem is weight' tells you the topic. The two marks are for two genuinely different points: how heavy the load is, and what the buildings were built to hold. Note the figures Yabut gives, 'Of the first hundred and ten roofs Yabut inspected she approved forty-one', which is the evidence that most were refused but is not itself a reason. Quoting the statistic instead of a reason earns nothing.

1(d)(i) Two ways the rainfall pattern makes rooftop growing difficult [2]

1. The rain is spread very unevenly across the year, with roughly half the year producing almost none, so growers face a long dry period they must somehow survive: 'six months of almost nothing'. [1]
2. When rain does come it comes all at once, so the storage fills immediately and the rest of the storm water is lost: storms 'fill every drum in an hour and overflow for a week afterwards'. [1]

The key phrase to notice is 'Manila rain arrives in the wrong shape', which announces that the problem is the pattern rather than the total amount. The two marks must come from two different ideas. A candidate who makes only the second point twice, once as 'the storms are too heavy' and again as 'the drums overflow', scores 1, because those are the same idea in two forms. The typhoon that 'peeled the netting off a roof in Kapitolyo' is storm damage, not a feature of the rainfall pattern, so it does not answer this question.

1(d)(ii) Why Escalante would spend the money elsewhere [3]

1. Even in the best case the output is tiny: if every suitable roof in Metro Manila 'were planted tomorrow the harvest would still meet under two per cent of the demand for vegetables', so the return does not justify the outlay. [1]
2. He would put the same money into transport and refrigerated storage instead: 'the roads and cold stores'. [1]
3. That spending would rescue the third of the highland cabbage crop currently wasted in transit, because it would 'stop a third of the Benguet cabbage from rotting on the way down', which is a far larger gain in food for the same money. [1]

The three marks form a single chain of reasoning, and you need all three links: the rooftop gain is small, there is an alternative use for the money, and that alternative delivers more food. The comparison in paragraph 3, where 'a third of the load has been thrown away' after a day and a half in an unrefrigerated truck, is the earlier detail Escalante is relying on. Answers that stop at 'two per cent is too small' score 1, because the question asks why the money would do more good somewhere else, which requires you to name that somewhere and say what it would achieve.

1(e) 'Two per cent is not the harvest. It is the receipt.' [3]

1. Delgado accepts the figure but rejects the test: 'Delgado does not argue with his arithmetic. She argues about what the arithmetic is for.' She agrees the weight of vegetables is small and denies that the project should be judged by it. [1]
2. A receipt is only a record or proof that a transaction happened; it is not the goods themselves. So the vegetables are the visible evidence of something else, not the thing of value. [1]
3. The real return is what the vegetables stand for: the cooperative 'has trained six hundred people, most of them women over fifty who had never been paid for work before, and it pays them for what they cut', and it has 'turned eleven roofs that were used for nothing at all' into places where children see 'a tomato still attached to its plant'. [1]

This is an image question, so the mark scheme wants the logic of the image unpacked, not repeated. Ask what a receipt actually does: it proves a purchase; it is small, paper and worth nothing in itself; it points to the transaction rather than being it. Transfer each of those properties to the two per cent, and the third mark then requires you to name what the receipt is evidence of: paid work for people who had never earned, unused space brought back into use, and children taught where food comes from.

1(f) Summary of the difficulties in Text B [15: 10 content + 5 writing]

The content mark is a straightforward tally: one mark per difficulty found, to a maximum of 10 out of the 13 available. The selection principle is the whole skill here. A point counts if it is a separate difficulty the writer met while running the farm. It does not count if it is a repetition of a point already made, an example illustrating one, a benefit, or advice.

Applying that test to Text B: the closing shade paragraph is a benefit ('What I do not regret is the shade', the flat below 'was measurably cooler for six summers'), and the final instruction to spend money on ground-level lots is advice. Neither is creditable. Equally, 'nine hundred schoolchildren climbed those steps' is a success, not a difficulty, even though it mentions the stairs.

The thirteen creditable points, any ten of which score:

1. The wind nine floors up was a constant dry pressure.
2. It drew moisture from the leaves faster than the roots could replace it.
3. More plants died from wind in a single March than from insects in six years.
4. The screens built to block the wind behaved like sails in bad weather.
5. Constant dust from traffic and cement works meant every leaf had to be washed twice before sale.
6. The washing water had to be carried up by hand, a cost nobody accounts for.
7. With no lift, compost, pipe, timber, seedlings and water all went up ninety-four steps on somebody's shoulder.
8. Volunteers left once they understood the climb, so the workforce fell from about twenty to four.
9. The roof was shared property with competing uses, laundry, pigeons and summer sleeping, and no written agreement.
10. A damp patch on a ceiling below made the farm the suspect for every fault in the building.
11. No insurance company in Cairo would cover the project.
12. The owner's permission had to be renewed each January, giving forty families a yearly chance to object.
13. The produce cost about three times as much to grow as Delta produce yet looked identical, so it sold only as a favour and the business was never viable.

Notice how paragraph 2 yields four points on its own: the wind's nature, its effect on the leaves, the scale of the losses, and the failure of the remedy. Splitting a paragraph into its distinct claims is how you reach ten points inside 120 words.

Model summary (115 words):

Nine floors up the wind was a constant dry force stripping moisture from leaves faster than roots replaced it, killing more plants in one March than insects had in six years, while screens built against it acted like sails in rough weather. Traffic and cement dust meant every leaf needed washing twice, and the washing water had to be hauled upstairs. Without a lift, supplies climbed ninety-four steps on foot, so volunteers drifted away and twenty workers became four. The roof was communal and undocumented; one damp ceiling made the farm suspect for every fault, insurers refused cover, and annual permission let forty families object. Costs were triple Delta rivals', so sales depended on charity.

That version covers points 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13, which is above the ten needed, and it does so by joining related points with semicolons and 'so' rather than listing them.

Quality of writing [5]

• Level 5 (5 marks): Consistently concise, well organised and fluent, entirely in the candidate's own words, with points grouped and linked so that the answer reads as continuous prose rather than a list.
• Level 4 (4 marks): Mostly concise and well ordered, own words used for the great majority of points, only occasional lifting of short phrases.
• Level 3 (3 marks): Generally clear and organised, but with some repetition, some unnecessary comment or example, and noticeable reliance on the wording of the text.
• Level 2 (2 marks): Some organisation, but the answer wanders, over-explains or lifts whole sentences. Sense is usually clear.
• Level 1 (1 mark): Largely copied or in note form, with little shaping of the material.
• 0 marks: No creditable written response.

Answers longer than 120 words are not penalised directly, but material beyond the limit is unlikely to be concise and will lose marks under this heading. The commonest way to lose writing marks is to keep the text's own phrasing: 'behaved like sails' and 'on somebody's back' are borrowings, so recast them as 'acted like sails' and 'carried up on foot'. Numbers such as ninety-four steps and six years may be kept, because a figure has no synonym.