Look again at lines 13 to 29. In your own words, describe what happens to the mule train during the storm.

Notes for examiners

This question tests the candidate's ability to follow a sequence of events and retell it accurately in their own words. Four separate creditable points are needed, one mark each, to a maximum of [4]. The instruction to use your own words is the discriminator: understanding is shown by re-expression, so a script that copies the writer's sentences has not demonstrated the skill even if it has selected the right material. Quotations are not required here and earn nothing on their own.

The creditable points in lines 13 to 29

1. The sky looks dull as the climb begins, but the writer thinks nothing of it because it is often "the colour of dishwater" and usually comes to nothing. [1]
2. Part way through the morning the wind changes direction: "the wind had swung round to the south". [1]
3. The snow does not drop but is driven horizontally past them: "not falling but travelling sideways". [1]
4. The stone markers that show the route are blotted out one after another: "the cairns that mark the trail went out one by one like candles". [1]
5. The uncle brings the animals to a halt: "Don Ruperto stopped the string". [1]
6. The wind is too loud for shouting, so he speaks straight into the writer's ear, having "put his mouth close to my ear". [1]
7. He decides to abandon the high route and shelter lower down until conditions improve: "we would go down into the gully at Piedra Ancha and wait". [1]
8. The descent is punishingly slow, taking "three hours to cover what a man can walk in forty minutes". [1]
9. Snow levels out the dips so the ground looks flat, and the writer falls into one "up to my chest" on two occasions. [1]
10. The youngest mule loses her footing on ice and comes down on her side with her load still on her, having "put a foot wrong on a slab of ice". [1]
11. The window glass she is carrying is destroyed, and they hear it go: "We heard it break through the sacking". [1]
12. The uncle says nothing about the loss and instead frees the crate, gets the animal up and settles her: "walked her in circles until she stopped shaking". [1]

Any four of these secure full marks. The strongest scripts choose four points that are genuinely distinct, rather than three ways of saying that the weather got worse.

What own words means here

Compare a lifted answer with a re-expressed one. Lifted: the snow was "not falling but travelling sideways" and "the cairns that mark the trail went out one by one like candles". Re-expressed: the wind was so strong that the snow blew horizontally instead of dropping, and the stone markers that showed the way disappeared from sight one after another. The second version proves that the candidate has understood that cairns are route markers and that the phrase about candles means they vanished from view rather than that anything was extinguished. That is exactly what the mark is for.

Examination takeaway: change the writer's vocabulary, not the writer's meaning. Keep proper names and technical terms as they are, and re-express everything around them.