Use ideas from BOTH Text One and Text Two to answer this question. A news website is running a series called Living With The Weather. Write a contribution t...

What is being tested

Thirty marks split three ways. Ten are for what you take from the two texts and how you rework it (AO1), twelve are for handling the form, purpose, audience and register of a website contribution (AO4), and eight are for organisation, vocabulary, sentence variety and accuracy (AO5). Content and accuracy are marked separately, so a piece full of good material in careless prose and a piece of clean prose with nothing in it both lose heavily, in different columns.

Reading the brief

Purpose: to inform readers about how people live with a demanding climate and to argue for practical change. Audience: general readers of a news website. Form: a contribution to a website, with a clear opening, developed paragraphs and a definite close. The three prompts in the task are a structure offered to you: the habits people build around difficult weather, the limits of simply getting used to it, and the practical changes that would help most. Notice that the first prompt is served mainly by Text One, the second by both, and the third almost entirely by Text Two. A piece that answers all three necessarily uses both texts, which is what AO1 rewards.

Material worth taking from Text One

• The everyday habits a difficult climate creates. Carrying water even to the end of the street, drinking before you are thirsty, not running in the afternoon, wearing a hat because "a hat is not a fashion but a roof", wedging shutters with folded cardboard, hanging washing so that it does not tear, planting the lemon tree in the lee of the wall. These are small, concrete and transferable, and a contribution that opens with two or three of them earns its reader's attention faster than a general statement about hot countries.
• Reading the sky for warning signs. The goats standing "in a tight knot against the north wall of the pen", light the colour of weak tea, shadows that lose their edges, a dry crackle on the radio, air that "smelled of wet stone before a single drop had fallen near us". This is a community early warning system built out of observation, and it lets you argue that local knowledge is worth as much as an official forecast.
• Adaptation learnt young and turned into identity. The writer was taught the climate "before I could read", calls the habits "the grammar of the place", and says the wind was not endured but arranged around, "the way you arrange furniture around a pillar you cannot move". The closing idea, that the daily answering was "most of what we meant when we said we came from there", gives you a way to present coping as belonging rather than as complaint.

Material worth taking from Text Two

• The limits of individual habit. Karvane was built for a climate that no longer exists, with dark slate roofs and streets that lost their trees, and the argument is that the night, not the afternoon, is what harms people: "Recovery happens at night, or it does not happen at all." Habits cannot cool a top-floor flat that is warmer at midnight than at four in the afternoon.
• Unequal exposure. The northern districts under their plane trees run four to six degrees cooler than the eastern estates. "Heat in Karvane is not distributed by weather. It is distributed by history and by money", and it lands hardest on the households least able to leave. This is the strongest single idea available to you for a persuasive close.
• Concrete measures worth extending. Reflective white roof coating that lowers slate surface temperature by up to twenty degrees, six thousand drought-tolerant semi-mature trees, "nine air-conditioned libraries and sports halls as free cooling centres", and a rewritten building code demanding cross-ventilation and external shading on west-facing windows.
• The objection that pilots are too small. Eleven school roofs do nothing for eight thousand flats, six thousand trees is a start on a deficit of sixty thousand, and the cooling centres close at night when the danger is highest. "Every measure so far has been a pilot, and pilots are how a council shows concern without confronting cost."
• The challenge to pride itself. People say they are used to the heat, but "nobody is used to forty-one degrees; they have simply not been offered an alternative". The blunt formulation, "Getting used to a climate is not an achievement", is the pivot your second prompt needs.

How to combine them rather than list them

The two texts do not simply illustrate the same point, so the strongest responses put them in tension and resolve it. One route: community knowledge and public investment are both needed, because Villanueva shows what habit can do and Karvane shows exactly where habit stops. Another: contest one text with the other, using Karvane's line about pride to question whether the writer of Text One is romanticising a hardship that better building would have removed, or using Villanueva's roof repaired within a week to argue that Karvane's problem is not knowledge but scale and money. Either way, the argument must be yours; the texts supply the evidence.

Register matters as much as material. A news website wants a title or an opening hook, short paragraphs, direct address, one memorable detail early, and a persuasive close that asks for something specific rather than trailing off. Rewording is not decoration: material lifted in the source writer's voice reads as copied and caps AO1 low, while the same idea recast in your own sentences and applied to the reader's situation reads as selected and used.

What a weak answer does instead

The commonest weak response summarises Text One for half the piece and Text Two for the other half, with a joining sentence such as Text Two is about a hot city. That is two summaries, not a contribution, and it also breaks form, because a website reader has not read either source. A second weak pattern takes all its material from Text Two, because Text Two already sounds like an argument, leaving the habits prompt unanswered and the balance uneven. A third writes a general essay about climate change with no anchoring detail at all: no shutters, no goats, no reflective paint, nothing a reader could remember an hour later.

AO1 (10 marks), for selecting and using ideas from both texts

• Level 1 (1-2 marks): a very limited amount of material taken from the texts, often copied and not adapted to the task.
• Level 2 (3-4 marks): some material drawn from the texts, with the balance uneven and little reshaping for the new purpose.
• Level 3 (5-6 marks): a clear selection of relevant ideas from both texts, generally reworded for the task.
• Level 4 (7-8 marks): well judged selection from both texts, with ideas synthesised and applied to the task rather than listed.
• Level 5 (9-10 marks): assured and discriminating use of both texts, with ideas combined, interpreted and made to serve the candidate's own argument.

AO4 (12 marks), for purpose, audience, form, tone and register

• Level 1 (1-2 marks): the form is barely established and the register is unsuited to the audience.
• Level 2 (3-5 marks): the form is recognisable but inconsistently held, and the address to the audience is intermittent.
• Level 3 (6-8 marks): the form, purpose and audience are clear and mostly sustained, with a suitable register.
• Level 4 (9-10 marks): the form is confidently handled and the tone is well matched to purpose and audience throughout.
• Level 5 (11-12 marks): the writing is convincing in form and voice, with register controlled for deliberate effect.

AO5 (8 marks), for organisation, vocabulary, sentence variety and accuracy

• Level 1 (1 mark): little structure, a narrow vocabulary and errors that impede meaning.
• Level 2 (2-3 marks): some grouping of material, simple vocabulary and frequent errors, though meaning is generally clear.
• Level 3 (4-5 marks): a clear overall shape, varied vocabulary and sentence forms, with errors that do not obscure meaning.
• Level 4 (6-7 marks): well organised paragraphing, precise vocabulary and controlled sentence variety, with few errors.
• Level 5 (8 marks): fluent and deliberate organisation, ambitious and accurate vocabulary and a wide range of secure sentence structures.

Examination reminder: approximately 400 words is a real constraint, not a target to overshoot. Three or four developed paragraphs, each carrying one idea and one specific detail from a named source, will out-score a longer piece that recycles the same general point, because AO1 credits discrimination in selection and AO5 credits shape.