Read Source F. How does the writer help the reader to picture the early morning ride?

This question tests analysis of language and its effect (R4), for 10 marks. 'Help the reader to picture' means the marks are in the techniques that build the image.

1 to 3 marks: isolated detail or simple comment

Noting that the writer describes a bike ride and mentions a bakery.

4 to 7 marks: explaining method

1. The opening claim frames everything that follows: the city at six is a different country, so the ride becomes travel to somewhere foreign rather than a journey through the familiar. [1]
2. Sound is used before sight. For the first ten minutes the only sounds are his own tyres and the crows arguing in the plane trees, and 'arguing' gives the birds a relationship rather than a noise. [1]
3. Temperature is made shareable by moving it to another sense: the air over the boating lake is cold enough to taste. [1]

8 to 10 marks: sustained interpretation

The passage is built on deliberate changes of distance, and saying so is the route to the top band. At the bridge the road tips down and the eastern half of the city opens out in a low brown haze with the cranes standing in it like wading birds, which is the widest view in the piece and is immediately identified as the only minute of the day when he can see all of it at once. Then the scale collapses to a single smell arriving thirty metres before the bakery does.

The comedy is doing structural work too. The pigeon that walks out in front of him with the unhurried confidence of something that has never been hurried in its life stops the description becoming reverent about its own city, which is the risk a passage like this runs.

The ending refuses both easy descriptions. The city makes a sound that is not traffic and not quiet, but something between the two, like a room where people are beginning to wake up. Defining the hour by what it is not, and then reaching for a domestic image rather than a grand one, is the choice worth evaluating.