Read Text A, Learning the City, in the insert and then answer Question 1 (a) to (e) on this question paper. (a) Give two of the features of a city which, ac...

What Question 1 is testing. The whole question assesses reading, and the marks divide evenly: parts (a) to (e) are worth 15 marks for reading Text A for explicit and implicit meaning, and part (f) is worth 15 marks for selecting from Text B and summarizing it (10 for content, 5 for the quality of the writing). Two habits earn most of the marks here. The first is obeying the instruction "using your own words" wherever it appears, because an idea copied back in the writer's vocabulary is not evidence that you understood it. The second is reading the mark figure before writing: the number in brackets tells you how many separate ideas the examiner has to find, and almost every mark lost in this section is lost by supplying fewer ideas than the bracket asked for.

(a) Two features stitched together into the coyote's landscape [1]

This is pure retrieval, and the whole of it sits in the closing sentence of paragraph 3, which describes the city from the coyote's point of view as a warm, well-watered landscape with almost no hunters in it, "stitched together out of golf courses, cemeteries, railroad embankments and flood-control channels". Nothing needs to be explained or rephrased: the examiner wants the items themselves.

Model answer: Golf courses and cemeteries. Accept any two of golf courses, cemeteries, railroad embankments, flood-control channels. Both items must be correct for the single mark. [1]

The two tempting wrong answers come from misreading which sentence the question points at. The parking garage belongs to paragraph 1 and is where the photographed animal was heading, not part of the stitched landscape; the prairie appears in paragraph 3 only as the comparison the city beats ("more rabbits per acre than the prairie ever held"), so it is the opposite of a city feature.

(b) Own words for two phrases [2 + 2]

Own-words questions are marked by ideas, not by elegance, and a two-mark phrase always contains two separable ideas. The rule that decides most of these marks is that you may not re-use the key word you were asked to explain, or a word from the same family, because doing so simply hands the phrase back.

(i) "a panic-stricken bolt" splits at the hyphenated adjective and the noun. "Panic-stricken" supplies the emotion: overwhelming, uncontrollable fear. "Bolt" supplies the movement: one sudden, headlong dash. The surrounding sentence confirms both, because it sets the phrase against what the coyotes actually do, "crossing at a steady trot", so the phrase names the frightened, unplanned behavior the city animal has stopped showing.

Model answer: A sudden headlong rush made in complete terror, the animal running blindly instead of choosing its moment. 1 mark for the idea of extreme fear or terror; 1 mark for the idea of a sudden, uncontrolled rush or sprint. Reward "running away in a blind rush because it is frightened". "Panicking" or "bolting" score nothing for the idea they are meant to replace. [2]

(ii) "lost their wariness" splits the same way. "Wariness" is caution: watching for danger and keeping a distance from it. "Lost" says that this caution has gone, worn away by being fed, so the animal no longer treats a person as something to be careful about.

Model answer: They stopped being cautious around human beings and no longer treated them as a danger to watch out for. 1 mark for the idea of caution, watchfulness or suspicion; 1 mark for the idea that it has gone or been given up. [2]

"They are not scared of people any more" is worth 1 mark only. It captures the loss but converts wariness into plain fear, and wariness is alertness rather than fright: a wary animal is not terrified, it is keeping watch.

(c) Two ways city behavior differs from open-country behavior [2]

The command is "differs", so each mark needs the same feature described on both sides. An answer that only reports what city coyotes do has given half a difference; it is safer to write the contrast out than to hope the examiner infers the missing half.

1. The clock. Paragraph 4 states the contrast directly: country coyotes "hunt through the day and the night alike", while city coyotes are "emphatically nocturnal", compressing almost all their movement into the hours between midnight and five in the morning. The Denver radio-collar evidence sharpens it: the same animals that cross eight-lane highways at three in the morning will not set foot on that asphalt at noon. As the text puts it, what has changed is not the coyote's stomach but its clock. [1]
2. Traffic. City coyotes have learned traffic as a skill. They wait at a curb until a gap opens in the cars and then cross at a steady trot, a deliberate judgment of the moment that a country animal has no reason to acquire. [1]

Maximum 2 marks. A third answer defensible from paragraph 4 is that city pups perform the traffic behavior from their first season, so the skill is taught by the parents rather than reinvented by each animal, which is itself a difference between city-born and country-born coyotes. Treat the smaller, more sharply drawn territories with caution: that is a genuine difference, but it comes from paragraph 5, and this question names paragraphs 3 and 4. Credit it if it is accurately expressed, but do not present it to candidates as one of the two intended answers.

(d) Two facts about family life, and what they explain [2]

This is a two-stage question and the marks follow the two stages: one mark for the facts, one mark for the inference drawn from them. A candidate who lists facts accurately but never connects them to the failure of removal is capped at 1, and so is a candidate who asserts that removal fails without grounding it in paragraph 5.

The creditable facts are all in paragraph 5: coyotes are genuinely monogamous, which is rare among mammals; a bonded pair holds and defends the same territory of two to five square miles for years; city territories are smaller and more sharply drawn because the food in them is concentrated; the pups stay through their first winter; those pups help raise the litter that follows.

Model answer: Coyotes pair for life and a bonded pair holds the same territory for years, and their pups stay through the first winter and help to raise the next litter. Because the arrangement is stable and keeps producing grown offspring who need ground of their own, a territory left empty in a food-rich city is claimed by a new pair within weeks, so killing one animal changes nothing. 1 mark for two accurate facts, 1 mark for the explanation that a vacancy in good habitat is refilled quickly. [2]

The reasoning worth teaching is that the territory, not the animal, is the resource. Removal takes away one occupant of a good piece of ground while leaving the ground, its food and the line of young adults looking for it exactly as they were, which is why the population absorbs the loss without changing.

(e) Own words for two images, three ideas each [3 + 3]

These are the parts that separate the strongest scripts from the rest. Three marks signals three separable ideas, and a figurative sentence has to be converted into literal terms: re-describing the picture, or admiring it as a nice image, earns nothing.

(i) "When settlers cleared wolves from the eastern half of the continent, they emptied a chair at the table, and the coyote sat down in it." The image is a dinner table with a fixed number of seats, so each part of the sentence carries one ecological idea.

1. The chair stands for a position in the natural order: the wolf was the larger, more powerful predator feeding on the same prey, and paragraph 2 says the coyote lived "in the shadow" of it, so the wolf both held the place and kept the coyote down. [1]
2. "Emptied" says people removed the wolves deliberately, leaving that position unoccupied with nothing competing for the food or the ground. [1]
3. "Sat down in it" says the coyote moved into the vacant role and took it over, and did so easily, which is why it could then spread across the continent even while being hunted relentlessly. [1]

An answer that says only "the coyote replaced the wolf" has one idea and one mark. The three parts of the sentence are the three marks, and separating them out is the whole technique.

(ii) "It asks something of residents that ordinance and trapping never did: attention." The sentence works by contrast between two eras of policy, so the ideas divide into what the old approach required, what the new one requires, and where the responsibility ends up.

1. Laws and trapping demanded nothing from ordinary people: an official dealt with the animal, and residents had no part to play. [1]
2. Hazing only works if individual residents notice the animal, judge the moment and act on it themselves by shouting, waving a jacket or shaking a can of coins. [1]
3. Responsibility therefore shifts onto the public: it becomes a demand made on residents rather than a service delivered to them, and it cannot be handed over to the authorities. [1]

The verb "asks" is the word doing the work. It turns wildlife management from something done to animals into something requested of people, and "attention", held back to the end of the sentence for emphasis, names an ongoing effort rather than a one-time action.

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

The question asks one thing only: why some people argue that wild animals should be actively discouraged from cities. Text A is therefore out of bounds. Coyote diet, nocturnal habits and monogamy are interesting, correct and worth nothing here, and every word spent on them is a word taken from a 120-word budget. Content marks are awarded at one mark per separate point, up to 10.

Text B carries more creditable points than there are marks, so the skill being tested is selection and compression rather than exhaustiveness:

Mark each of these as a separate point when a candidate expresses it separately. In particular, road deaths and the charge that urban wildlife diverts money and attention from real habitat are two different arguments, and the cost falling on households rather than agencies is a point about fairness that stands apart from the loss of the pets themselves. Since only 10 marks are available, grouping them more tightly rarely changes a total, but it can under-credit a candidate who has genuinely found more.

Writing (5 marks). The writing mark rewards compression and independence from the original wording, not vocabulary for its own sake.

A lifted sentence still earns its content mark but pulls the writing mark down, so copying is a poor trade: it saves no marks and costs several.

Model answer (119 words): Critics say tolerance traps the animals: those that stop fearing people are eventually destroyed. Crowded urban populations hold diseases reaching pets and children easily, cats and small dogs disappear from yards, with families, not officials, absorbing that loss. Wildlife wrecks roofs, wiring, porches and gardens, while cities pay unbudgeted bills for containers, contractors and emergency calls. Numbers are artificially high because people feed them, so inflated predator numbers strip out songbirds and other small species. Poorer districts suffer most, rare attacks usually involve tamed animals and young children, and hazing needs compliance no street achieves. Roads kill thousands and injure drivers, and, worst of all, urban wildlife lets cities feel conservationist while the habitat that matters is destroyed elsewhere. [15]

Three things make that answer work. It carries more than ten points in the space, so rejecting one of them still leaves full content marks. It compresses by generalizing rather than by listing, turning "rabies, leptospirosis and raccoon roundworm" into "diseases" because the examples are illustration, not argument. And it does its joining with ordinary connectives ("since", "while", "so", "worst of all"), which is how a summary stays continuous prose instead of drifting into notes.

Examination takeaway. Let the mark figure decide the shape of the answer before you write a word. One mark means lift the exact detail. Two marks mean two ideas, or the same feature stated on both sides of a contrast. Three marks mean three separable ideas pulled out of one image and translated into plain terms. Ten content marks in 120 words means about one point every twelve words, which is only achievable if you plan which points to take and then generalize away the examples.