In lines 6 to 11, the writer gives details of the effects of the heat on the city during the summer just gone. State one of these details.

What this question tests

An AO1 retrieval question worth 1 mark. Lines 6 to 11 are the evidence paragraph of the article, the place where the writer stops generalising about Karvane and gives measured facts about a single summer. You are being asked to lift one of those facts accurately.

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

• Thirty-one days were hotter than thirty-eight degrees. The city "recorded thirty-one days above thirty-eight degrees", a count of days rather than a single peak reading.
• The hospital treated a large number of people for heat illness. It "admitted four hundred and twelve people for heat illness".
• The trams stopped running on six afternoons. "the tram network shut for six afternoons".
• The rails had expanded too far in the heat. The trams stopped "because the rails had expanded beyond their tolerance", which is the cause of the shutdown and is creditable in its own right.
• The city was left without enough shade. The writer distinguishes two shortages: the city "did not run out of water", but "It ran out of shade".

Any one of these in your own words is worth the mark. Rounding a figure loses nothing, but changing it does: writing that four hundred people were treated is acceptable, writing four thousand is not.

Reading the window

The paragraph is built as a single list sentence with three clauses joined by "and", then a short pair of sentences that turn the facts into the article's thesis. Every clause of that list is a separate detail, so you have several safe choices and need only one. The numbers are the giveaway: where an information text suddenly produces counted quantities, that is almost always the material a one-mark retrieval question is set on.

How the mark is commonly lost

Candidates lose this mark most often by drifting into the causes of the problem given earlier in the passage. The dark slate roofs, the west-facing terraces and the grid of wide streets are decisions taken in 1912; they explain why the city overheats, but they are not effects of the heat in the summer just gone, and they lie in lines 1 to 5. The night-time heat retention explained further down the article is likewise outside the window. A second loss is copying the entire sentence from "In the summer just gone" to "tolerance", which shows the detail has been located but not selected, and can be read as three answers where one was asked for.

Examination point

Facts in this paper are usually clustered. When the question gives you a six-line window, expect that window to contain four or five creditable details and choose the one you can state most exactly in a single clause.