In lines 1 to 8, the writer describes things that the wind did to her family's house. Identify one of them.

What this question tests

This is an AO1 retrieval question worth 1 mark. It asks for one piece of information that is already stated on the page, inside a stated line window. No comment on the writer's craft is required and none is credited. The whole task is to locate, select and report accurately.

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

• The wind shook the shutters. The writer states that "It rattled the shutters until my mother wedged them with folded cardboard", so the effect can be given either as the rattling itself or as the wedging it forced on the household.
• It removed the paint from the south door. The text says the wind "stripped the paint from the south door in long curls", and the verb "stripped" carries the whole point: the paint did not fade, it was taken off.
• It blew dust into the house under that door. The wind "pushed fine grey dust under that door" and left it spread across the floor tiles inside.
• It lifted a corner of the metal roof and set it making a noise. The wind "lifted one corner of the roof iron and set it ticking like a clock".

Any of these in the candidate's own words is fully creditable. A candidate who writes that the wind loosened the roofing and made it tick has retrieved the same detail as one who copies the phrase, and both score.

Reading the window

Lines 1 to 8 are organised for you. The writer announces in advance that the wind "did four things to our house without fail" and then gives those four things in four consecutive sentences, each beginning with the pronoun "It". Once you notice that signpost, the answer is simply the first of the four sentences you reach. The instruction is one of them, so a single effect, clearly expressed, is a complete answer.

How the mark is commonly lost

The commonest loss is answering from outside the window. The father's nickname for the wind, the tenant "because it paid nothing and complained constantly", is memorable and sits only one line further on, but it lies at lines 9 to 10 and is not something the wind did to the house, so it earns nothing here. The second loss is vagueness: an answer such as the wind damaged the house names no detail and could have been written without reading the passage. The third is over-answering. Listing all four effects wastes time you need for the ten-mark and thirty-mark tasks later in the paper, and if one of the four is wrong an examiner cannot ignore it to reward the others.

Examination point

When a stem says "Identify one", write one short sentence and move on. A lifted phrase is safe, a precise paraphrase is equally safe, and anything from beyond the stated lines is worth nothing however accurate it is about the passage as a whole.