In the section 'Reading the sky', the writer describes signs that a storm was on its way. State one of them.

What this question tests

An AO1 retrieval question worth 1 mark, scoped to a named section rather than to numbered lines. The skill is the same as for a line-window question: find the part of the text the stem points to, then take one clearly stated detail out of it.

Answers that earn the mark (1 mark for any one)

• The goats came down from the ridge and packed themselves against the wall of the pen. They stood in a "tight knot against the north wall of the pen", and the writer adds that this happened "an hour before anything showed at all", which is what makes it a warning rather than a reaction.
• The daylight changed colour. "The light went a thick yellow-brown, the colour of weak tea".
• Shadows lost their sharpness. The text states that "the shadows lost their edges".
• The kitchen radio filled with interference. It "filled with a dry crackle that had nothing to do with the station".
• The air smelled of wet stone before any rain reached the town. The air "smelled of wet stone before a single drop had fallen near us".

Any one of these, in the candidate's own words, takes the mark. A candidate who writes that the radio buzzed with static has retrieved the same sign as one who quotes it.

Reading the section

The section opens by telling you what it contains: "There were signs, and every child in Villanueva could read them." A sentence like that is an instruction to the reader as much as a statement, and the details that follow it are the answer bank. Notice also that the signs are spread across the senses, sight in the light and the shadows, sound in the radio, smell in the wet stone, and behaviour in the goats. Picking any one of those strands gives you a clean, separate answer.

How the mark is commonly lost

The most frequent error is choosing what happened after the signs rather than the signs themselves. The town packing itself away in ten minutes, the washing coming off the line and the shutters being wedged, is the response to the warning, not a warning that a storm was coming, so it does not answer the question asked. A second error is answering from Text One's opening instead, where the shutters rattle and the roof iron ticks. That material describes the wind on an ordinary afternoon and lies outside the named section. A third is writing a whole sentence of context and never naming a sign at all: the writer says that everybody knew what was coming reports the idea of the section without giving the detail the mark is for.

Examination point

When the stem names a section rather than lines, find the heading first and read only underneath it. Everything you need for one mark will be there, and anything you remember from elsewhere in the passage is a distraction.