Question 5 is based on both Text One and Text Two. Compare how the writers present their ideas and perspectives about surviving in cold mountain conditions....

Notes for examiners

This question tests AO3 alone: the ability to explore links and connections between two texts and to compare the ideas and perspectives the writers present about surviving in cold mountain conditions. Marks are awarded for comparison, not for analysis of either text on its own, so a script that gives an excellent account of the muleteer narrative and then an excellent account of the rescue leader guidance, with no connective work between them, cannot rise above the bottom of the range. The unit of credit is the comparison, and each one should touch both texts.

The two texts differ in form and purpose before they differ in opinion. Text One is a retrospective personal narrative that lets one ordeal unfold in sequence; Text Two is instructional writing addressed to a reader who has not yet been caught out, and it is organised around commands. Strong candidates use that difference as a lens: the same ideas about cold, about the mind and about staying put arrive as remembered experience in one text and as method in the other. References should be short, embedded and roughly balanced. A script quoting six times from one text and once from the other has not met the balance requirement, however perceptive its individual points.

Points of comparison a strong answer is likely to make

• Experience as the source of authority, singular against repeated. Both writers claim the right to speak from having been there, but the claims are shaped differently. Text One is written by somebody who was "I was nineteen that winter", so the authority is that of a survivor recalling one crossing, and it is borrowed from an older man who "had crossed it" for "forty years running". Text Two claims authority in the writer's own person and in numbers: "I have led a rescue team for nineteen winters". The coincidence of nineteen is worth noticing, because one text uses the figure for an age and the other for a career, which neatly marks the difference between an ordeal endured once and a hazard managed professionally.
• The cold as patient and impersonal rather than cruel. The two writers converge here almost exactly. Text One describes cold that "does not arrive all at once. It works inwards, patiently, taking the" body by stages, while Text Two insists that the mountain is not a monster or an enemy but a machine, and that "It is indifferent." Text Two then presses the idea further into argument: "Indifference is more dangerous than malice, because malice at least pays attention." The perspectives agree on the nature of the threat; what differs is that Text One arrives at it through sensation and Text Two states it as a principle the reader is asked to carry.
• The mind, not the weather, as the real danger. This is the strongest single link between the texts. The narrator of Text One twice gets to his feet convinced that he can walk to the village, an idea he recognises immediately as "which was a lie, and I knew it was a lie", and Text Two names the same phenomenon in advance as "the story your own mind begins to tell you", warning that the voice sounds like you and uses your vocabulary. The difference is one of function: in Text One the delusion is a remembered near miss that his uncle physically prevents, while in Text Two it is a predicted condition with a prescribed response, "Treat that voice as weather." One text shows the danger, the other inoculates against it.
• Occupation and counting as survival technique. Both writers present routine tasks as the thing that keeps people alive. In Text One the uncle "He kept us alive with jobs", making his nephew count mules by touch and recite "the names of my brothers and sisters" until the narrator understands, much later, that what mattered was only that each thing was a "task and it had an end". Text Two turns the same insight into an order: "Count it aloud." Counting appears in both as a defence against the mind, but Text One presents it as improvised kindness from one man to a frightened boy, while Text Two presents it as procedure, repeated and impersonal.
• Shelter improvised from what is to hand. The practical advice matches almost exactly. Text One records that the party "We stacked the salt sacks into a low wall to close off the wind", and Text Two lists the same principle as options: "a wall of packs, a hollow, the lee of a boulder". Text One earns the point through a specific cargo on a specific night; Text Two generalises it so that it will fit any reader on any hill. That contrast between the particular and the transferable runs through the whole pair.
• Slowness accepted, but for different reasons. Text One measures slowness as physical hardship: "Going down took us three hours" over ground a walker would cross in a fraction of the time, and the narrator falls into buried hollows twice, since "twice I stepped into one up to my chest". Text Two prescribes slowness as method, replacing eyesight with arithmetic: "Take a bearing." and "bring the group up to them", a technique the writer admits is painfully slow yet defends because it "has never once let me down". In one text slowness is what the mountain imposes; in the other it is what the walker must choose.
• Companionship, animal and organised. Warmth and reassurance come from a mule in Text One, where the narrator sits between the animals and reports "I put my back against her ribs", and the old mule who leads the way is the one who "did not need to be told where the path was". Text Two has no animals and no solitude either: the group is the unit, counted, moved together and finally waited for by a rescue team who promise "we will find you". Survival is a relationship with a working animal in one text and a system of people in the other.
• Cost admitted against comfort offered. The endings diverge most sharply here. Text One is honest about permanent damage in a flat clause: "I lost the ends of two fingers on my right hand", and it offers no consolation for it. Text Two ends with reassurance and an instruction, "Stay where you are and let us.", which is possible because a rescue service exists behind the writer. The perspectives are not in conflict so much as differently situated: the muleteers had nobody coming, and the modern walker does.
• Tone: understatement against deliberate dullness. Text One refuses drama, and says so directly, reporting that people look disappointed when he tells them "I was mostly bored, and then mostly busy". Text Two also refuses excitement, but by design and for a stated reason: "It is meant to be dull enough to remember." Both writers therefore distrust the exciting version of mountain survival, one because that is honestly how it felt, the other because memorable advice must be plain. That is a subtle link and rewards candidates who see that similar tones can arise from very different purposes.
• What each text leaves the reader with. Text One closes on a private object, a dented mule bell that the narrator concedes is "not a good bell" but keeps because it is the sound he was "following when I could not see anything at all". Text Two closes on a public instruction and a promise of rescue. The final images capture the two perspectives exactly: one is memory, personal and unusable by anybody else; the other is procedure, written to be used by strangers. A strong conclusion will connect these endings rather than summarising each in turn.

Assessment: AO3, 22 marks

• Level 1, 1 to 4 marks. The texts are described separately with little or no comparison and few references. Typically two summaries joined by a final sentence saying both are about cold.
• Level 2, 5 to 8 marks. Simple comparisons of content, with some relevant references and limited comment on perspective. Connectives such as both and whereas appear, but the point compared is usually subject matter rather than viewpoint.
• Level 3, 9 to 13 marks. Clear comparison of ideas and perspectives, supported from both texts, with some comment on how the writers convey them. The move from Level 2 is that the candidate compares attitudes, for example both writers treating the mind as the chief hazard, rather than comparing events.
• Level 4, 14 to 18 marks. Sustained comparison of ideas, perspectives and methods, with well selected references from both texts and an explanation of how each writer builds a viewpoint. The move from Level 3 is that method becomes part of the comparison: narrative retrospect against direct address, anecdote against imperative.
• Level 5, 19 to 22 marks. Perceptive, evaluative comparison with precise references throughout, exploring the writers' differing purposes and the effect of their choices on a reader. The move from Level 4 is evaluation: judging why a survivor writing about one winter and a professional writing for future walkers reach the same conclusions by opposite routes, and what each gains and loses by its form.

Examination takeaway

Build each paragraph around one idea that both texts address, then bring a short quotation from each into that paragraph. Comparing purposes, one writer remembering and one writer instructing, will usually take you further than comparing content, because it explains why two writers who agree about the danger sound so unlike one another.