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Instruction
1 A commuter waiting for the 6:14 train in downtown Chicago photographed a coyote trotting along the empty track below the platform. The animal was in no hurry. It stopped to drink from a puddle of melted snow, glanced once at the row of sleepy passengers above it, and slipped through a gap in a chain-link fence toward a parking garage. By evening the photograph 5 had traveled the length of the country. The biologists who study urban wildlife were the only people in America not startled by it. For twenty years they have been repeating a single sentence to anyone who will listen: the coyote is now a city animal, and most Americans live within two miles of one without ever suspecting it.
2 Canis latrans, the coyote, began as 10 a creature of open ground. Before 1850 its range was more or less the dry grassland and desert between the Mississippi River and the Rockies, and it lived there in the shadow of a larger and more powerful rival, the gray wolf. When settlers cleared wolves from the eastern half of the continent, they emptied a chair at the table, and the coyote sat down 15 in it. It has since spread into every state except Hawaii, into every Canadian province, and as far south as Panama. No large American predator has ever enlarged its territory so quickly while being hunted so relentlessly.
3 The obvious explanation, that cities are full of garbage, turns out to be mostly wrong. Researchers with the Midwest Urban Carnivore Study have spent years analyzing the 20 stomach contents and hair samples of city coyotes in Chicago, Denver and Atlanta. Trash makes up a surprisingly small share of the diet, usually under a tenth. The bulk is rodents, rabbits, deer fawns, fallen fruit and, in late summer, an astonishing quantity of grasshoppers. A city, from a coyote's point of view, is not a landfill. It is a warm, well-watered landscape with almost 25 no hunters in it, stitched together out of golf courses, cemeteries, railroad embankments and flood-control channels, and stocked with more rabbits per acre than the prairie ever held.
4 What has changed is not the coyote's stomach but its clock. Where their country cousins hunt through the day and the night alike, city coyotes have become emphatically nocturnal, compressing almost all of their movement into 30 the hours between midnight and five in the morning. Radio-collar data from Denver show individual animals crossing eight-lane highways at three a.m. that will not set a foot on the same asphalt at noon. They have learned traffic itself, too. Several studies have recorded coyotes waiting at a curb until a gap opens in the cars and then crossing at a steady trot rather than 35 in a panic-stricken bolt. Pups raised in the city do this from their first season, which suggests that the lesson passes from parent to pup rather than being reinvented by every animal.
5 Their family arrangements help them as well. Coyotes are monogamous, genuinely so, which is rare among mammals, and a bonded pair will hold and defend the same territory of two to five 40 square miles for years. City territories are smaller and more sharply drawn than country ones, because the food in them is so concentrated. The pups stay through their first winter and help to raise the litter that follows. That stability is the reason the removal of a single problem animal so seldom achieves anything: an empty territory in a productive city is claimed by a 45 new pair within weeks.
6 The friction is real, and it is not spread evenly. Coyotes do take domestic cats and, now and then, small dogs, mostly in spring, when a den holds hungry pups and the parents are at their least tolerant of anything that comes near it. Documented attacks on people are extremely rare, fewer across the whole country in a decade than 50 the dog bites recorded in one mid-sized city in a week, and the great majority of them involve animals that have been fed, deliberately or carelessly, until they lost their wariness. Wildlife officers now repeat one line more often than any other: a coyote that has learned to associate people with food is a different animal from one that has not.
7 That is why 55 the recommended response has shifted from removal to instruction. Hazing, which means shouting, waving a jacket or shaking a can of coins the moment a coyote lingers on a lawn, is meant to teach the animal that human beings are unrewarding and mildly alarming company. It asks something of residents that ordinance and trapping never did: attention. The coyote has proved itself an exceptional student 60 of the American city. The question still open is how quickly the city can learn about the coyote.
1 Not every biologist welcomes the arrival of coyotes, raccoons and wild turkeys on American sidewalks, and the objections are not merely squeamish ones. The first is that our tolerance is a trap for the animal itself. A coyote that is fed, or that teaches itself to feed from an unsecured trash can, gradually loses its fear of people, and a bold animal is sooner 5 or later a dead animal, destroyed by the same city that had admired it.
2 The second objection is medical. Dense urban populations of raccoons, skunks and foxes maintain permanent reservoirs of rabies, leptospirosis and raccoon roundworm, and the route by which any of those reaches a family dog or a child playing in a sandbox is a short one. Pets pay a more direct 10 price still. Cats and small dogs vanish from fenced yards every spring, and that loss falls on individual households rather than on the agencies that set the policy.
3 The costs are financial too, and they are rarely counted honestly. Raccoons open roofs and chew through wiring; skunks undermine porches; deer strip a year of gardening in a night; cities pay for reinforced containers, removal 15 contracts and emergency calls that no budget line anticipated. Nor are these populations natural ones. They survive at densities several times higher than any forest could support, propped up by human food and human water, so what a city is protecting is not a wild population but a subsidized one. Those inflated numbers then press hard on smaller creatures, and songbirds, turtles and ground-nesting species 20 are quietly eaten out of neighborhoods where a handful of adaptable predators have no rivals of their own.
4 There is a question of fairness as well, because the burden is not shared. Older districts with alley collection, absentee landlords and no money for wheeled bins carry far more of the problem than the leafy neighborhoods where the coexistence campaigns are usually designed. And while 25 serious attacks on people are rare, almost every one of them involves an animal that has grown used to human beings, and a disproportionate number involve small children. That is not a risk a city is entitled to accept on a resident's behalf.
5 Finally, the critics doubt that coexistence works as advertised. Hazing programs move the labor onto residents and depend on near-total compliance: 30 one neighbor who puts food out undoes an entire block's discipline. Roads take a toll of their own, killing thousands of animals a year and injuring drivers who swerve to avoid them. Worst of all, say the skeptics, urban wildlife flatters us. It allows a city to feel that it is conserving nature while the habitat that actually matters is being cleared a hundred miles 35 away, and it draws attention and money away from the protected land where those dollars would do some real good.
Instruction
1 The wildlife rehabilitation center sits at the back of a lumberyard on the northwest side of Chicago, behind a steel door that no longer shuts properly. I started volunteering there in October, Tuesdays, ten at night until six in the morning, and for the first month I did nothing but wash bowls. Ninety-two stainless steel bowls. I learned the building through its sounds before 5 I learned it through its rooms: the ticking of the incubators, the hum of the chest freezer, the small dry rustle from the songbird room that meant somebody in there was awake and unhappy about it.
2 By February I had been moved to intake, the job of meeting whatever comes through the door at two in the morning. Mostly it is pigeons, dazed and 10 compliant, but once it was a snapping turtle in a laundry basket, ancient and furious, its shell scored like an old dinner plate.
3 Dale drives. He is sixty-one, retired from the water department, and he has been driving the center's rescue van on winter nights for eleven years without ever, as far as anyone can establish, being thanked for it. The van is white, 15 rusted above the rear wheel well, and smells permanently of wet dog and old coffee. Dale keeps a folded blanket, two pairs of welding gloves and a bag of crackers on the passenger seat, and he moves them off for you with the resigned courtesy of a man who has done exactly this several thousand times.
4 The call came in at 1:20. A coyote, 20 hit by a car on Elston Avenue, had dragged itself into the drainage ditch behind a tire shop, and the man who found it had stood over it in the sleet for forty minutes, refusing to leave. Dale listened, wrote three words on his hand, and was reaching for his coat before the sentence was finished. "Marisol," he said. "Gloves."
5 The city at one 25 thirty in the morning is a different country. We went north up Elston through a corridor of shuttered auto shops, the wipers dragging their two gray arcs across the glass, and the sleet came at the windshield in long silver stitches, as though the night were being sewn shut ahead of us. The streetlights hung in the wet air like blown dandelion heads. At every 30 intersection the signals talked patiently to nobody at all, turning green for an empty road, and Dale drove without hurrying, both hands on the wheel, the heater roaring, humming something that had no tune in it.
6 The animal lay motionless in eight inches of black water at the bottom of the ditch, so completely camouflaged by the litter around it that for a few 35 seconds I could not distinguish it from the trash. Then it lifted its head. It was smaller than I had expected: a narrow, hungry geometry of a thing, its coat the color of wet cardboard, one hind leg folded wrongly beneath it. It did not snarl. It watched us come down the bank with a steady yellow attention that I have not been able to 40 put down since, not hatred and not quite fear either, but a kind of terrible arithmetic, working out what we were and what it had left. The sleet hissed on the water. Behind the fence a radio was still playing to itself in the empty tire shop.
7 Dale did everything slowly. He talked the entire time, not to me and not to the coyote, 45 but at a level pitch about nothing: the price of the tires in the window, the year he replaced the pipe under this street. He laid the blanket over the animal's head before he touched it, and it went still. "Marisol, you take the hips," he said. "Don't look at the leg. Just take the hips."
8 We carried it up the bank in the 50 blanket and it weighed nothing, twenty-six pounds of muscle and rain, and it never struggled once. In the back of the van I knelt with my hand flat against its ribs, feeling the fast shallow bellows of its breathing, and I counted stoplights the whole way back so that I would not count anything else.
9 The vet came in at four, in a raincoat 55 over her pajamas, and worked for an hour. The front leg was a clean break. The pelvis was not. She said what she had to say and Dale nodded as though he had been expecting it since Elston Avenue, which I think he had.
10 I went out at five and stood in the lot with the sleet turning to rain. Dale came out with 60 two coffees, handed me one, and offered nothing consoling, which I was grateful for. After a while he said, "Eleven years, Marisol. You get the ones you get." Then he told me he had a shift at the food bank at eight, and asked if I wanted a ride to the train.
11 I have thought about that animal's face every week since. Not because 65 it was sad: the center is full of sad. Not because we failed, although we did. It is the arithmetic. Somewhere north of us that night there were four thousand more of them, moving through the alleys and cemeteries and the long grass of the flood channels, running that same calculation about us, and getting it right far more often than we deserve.
Question 1 Report
Re-read Text C, The Night Shift, in the insert.
A local public radio station in Chicago is making a program about the people who work through the night in the city. A reporter interviews Dale, the volunteer driver, about the night the coyote was brought in from Elston Avenue.
Write the words of the interview.
In your interview you should:
Base your interview on what you have read in Text C, but be careful to use your own words. Address each of the three bullet points.
Begin your interview: "The call came in at about one twenty ...".
Write about 250 to 350 words.
Up to 15 marks are available for the content of your answer [15] and up to 10 marks for the quality of your writing [10].
[Total: 25]
What this question tests. Two things at once: whether you have read Text C closely enough to rebuild it from inside a different head, and whether you can hold a voice that is not the narrator's. You are Dale, not Marisol. He is sixty-one, retired from the water department, eleven winters into night work for which, as far as anyone can establish, he has never been thanked. He moves his blanket and gloves off the passenger seat with the resigned courtesy of a man who has done exactly this several thousand times, he talks at a level pitch about nothing while he works, he laid the blanket over the animal's head before he touched it, and he had guessed the outcome before the vet spoke. Everything the interview says should sound like that man: practical, unsentimental, quietly worn down. A script that retells Marisol's paragraphs in Marisol's tone has missed the central requirement however fluent it is.
The task requirements a marker checks first.
Read the three bullets as five demands. The first two bullets each contain two, joined by "and", and the second half of each is where the content marks are won:
Weak answers describe the ditch and then skip the handling, and generalize about wildlife while forgetting the callers. Check each of the five before you write.
Content [15]. Marks are for development: taking a detail from Text C and making something of it in Dale's voice, not listing details. Roughly even coverage of the three bullets is expected.
Content bands. 15-13: all three bullets fully and evenly covered, text detail convincingly developed, Dale's separate knowledge and point of view sustained. 12-10: all three covered with some development, one perhaps thinner; voice mostly held. 9-7: bullets covered largely by retelling; the role slips toward Marisol. 6-4: a bullet neglected, or the answer drifts away from Text C; role barely established. 3-1: fragmentary, or Text C copied with the pronouns changed. 0: nothing creditworthy.
Writing [10]. Register, structure and accuracy. What is wanted is speech for radio: an audible voice, an interview shape with the reporter present, sentences that a sixty-one year old driver would actually say, varied and precise vocabulary, secure punctuation of speech, and control of the word range. 10-9: assured and consistent voice, precise language, virtually error free. 8-7: clear voice and good control, minor lapses. 6-5: accurate but plain, some drift in register. 4-3: frequent errors that blur meaning, register inconsistent. 2-1: heavy error, little control. 0: not creditworthy. Penalize only what the task actually assesses: the wrong voice or register for a radio interview, note form or bullets in place of continuous speech, lifting from Text C rather than reworking it, and any bullet left unanswered.
Model answer (about 335 words).
The call came in at about one twenty. Coyote in the drainage ditch behind the tire shop off Elston, hit by a car. The man who phoned it in had been standing over the animal in the sleet for forty minutes and would not go home. I wrote three words on my hand and reached for my coat.
REPORTER: What did you find when you got down there?
Nothing, at first. Eight inches of black water at the bottom of that ditch and trash all through it, and the animal was the same color as the trash. Then it picked its head up. Smaller than people imagine, maybe twenty-six pounds, one back leg folded under it wrong. It never snarled at us once.
REPORTER: How did you get it up to the van?
Slowly, and talking the whole time about nothing at all. That is not chatter, that is the job. I laid the folded blanket over its head before I put a hand on it, because a thing that cannot see you generally stops fighting you, and it went still. Then I told Marisol to take the hips and not to look at the leg. We carried it up the bank in the blanket, laid it in the back, and it never struggled once.
REPORTER: Eleven winters. What does that teach you?
Patience, mostly. Most nights it is pigeons. Some nights you already know in the van what the vet is going to say, and you drive out anyway. The people surprise you, though. Nobody has ever called me up to say thank you. But somebody stood out in February sleet for forty minutes for an animal most of them would cross the street to avoid.
REPORTER: And to listeners who want them removed?
Only this. That one watched me come down the bank and never once went for me, and a car is what put it there. I am not asking anybody to love them. I am asking for an honest argument about what is actually in the ditch.
How this answer goes wrong. Stay inside what Dale can know. He was not inside Marisol's head in the back of the van, and the reflection that closes Text C is hers, not his. Just as important, invent nothing the passage does not give you: no numbers for the city's coyote population, no causes the text never mentions, no equipment nobody used. Detail that cannot be traced to a paragraph reads as padding to a marker, and it crowds out the developed points that actually earn the fifteen content marks. [Total: 25]
What this question tests. Two things at once: whether you have read Text C closely enough to rebuild it from inside a different head, and whether you can hold a voice that is not the narrator's. You are Dale, not Marisol. He is sixty-one, retired from the water department, eleven winters into night work for which, as far as anyone can establish, he has never been thanked. He moves his blanket and gloves off the passenger seat with the resigned courtesy of a man who has done exactly this several thousand times, he talks at a level pitch about nothing while he works, he laid the blanket over the animal's head before he touched it, and he had guessed the outcome before the vet spoke. Everything the interview says should sound like that man: practical, unsentimental, quietly worn down. A script that retells Marisol's paragraphs in Marisol's tone has missed the central requirement however fluent it is.
The task requirements a marker checks first.
Read the three bullets as five demands. The first two bullets each contain two, joined by "and", and the second half of each is where the content marks are won:
Weak answers describe the ditch and then skip the handling, and generalize about wildlife while forgetting the callers. Check each of the five before you write.
Content [15]. Marks are for development: taking a detail from Text C and making something of it in Dale's voice, not listing details. Roughly even coverage of the three bullets is expected.
Content bands. 15-13: all three bullets fully and evenly covered, text detail convincingly developed, Dale's separate knowledge and point of view sustained. 12-10: all three covered with some development, one perhaps thinner; voice mostly held. 9-7: bullets covered largely by retelling; the role slips toward Marisol. 6-4: a bullet neglected, or the answer drifts away from Text C; role barely established. 3-1: fragmentary, or Text C copied with the pronouns changed. 0: nothing creditworthy.
Writing [10]. Register, structure and accuracy. What is wanted is speech for radio: an audible voice, an interview shape with the reporter present, sentences that a sixty-one year old driver would actually say, varied and precise vocabulary, secure punctuation of speech, and control of the word range. 10-9: assured and consistent voice, precise language, virtually error free. 8-7: clear voice and good control, minor lapses. 6-5: accurate but plain, some drift in register. 4-3: frequent errors that blur meaning, register inconsistent. 2-1: heavy error, little control. 0: not creditworthy. Penalize only what the task actually assesses: the wrong voice or register for a radio interview, note form or bullets in place of continuous speech, lifting from Text C rather than reworking it, and any bullet left unanswered.
Model answer (about 335 words).
The call came in at about one twenty. Coyote in the drainage ditch behind the tire shop off Elston, hit by a car. The man who phoned it in had been standing over the animal in the sleet for forty minutes and would not go home. I wrote three words on my hand and reached for my coat.
REPORTER: What did you find when you got down there?
Nothing, at first. Eight inches of black water at the bottom of that ditch and trash all through it, and the animal was the same color as the trash. Then it picked its head up. Smaller than people imagine, maybe twenty-six pounds, one back leg folded under it wrong. It never snarled at us once.
REPORTER: How did you get it up to the van?
Slowly, and talking the whole time about nothing at all. That is not chatter, that is the job. I laid the folded blanket over its head before I put a hand on it, because a thing that cannot see you generally stops fighting you, and it went still. Then I told Marisol to take the hips and not to look at the leg. We carried it up the bank in the blanket, laid it in the back, and it never struggled once.
REPORTER: Eleven winters. What does that teach you?
Patience, mostly. Most nights it is pigeons. Some nights you already know in the van what the vet is going to say, and you drive out anyway. The people surprise you, though. Nobody has ever called me up to say thank you. But somebody stood out in February sleet for forty minutes for an animal most of them would cross the street to avoid.
REPORTER: And to listeners who want them removed?
Only this. That one watched me come down the bank and never once went for me, and a car is what put it there. I am not asking anybody to love them. I am asking for an honest argument about what is actually in the ditch.
How this answer goes wrong. Stay inside what Dale can know. He was not inside Marisol's head in the back of the van, and the reflection that closes Text C is hers, not his. Just as important, invent nothing the passage does not give you: no numbers for the city's coyote population, no causes the text never mentions, no equipment nobody used. Detail that cannot be traced to a paragraph reads as padding to a marker, and it crowds out the developed points that actually earn the fifteen content marks. [Total: 25]
Question 2 Report
Read Text C, The Night Shift, in the insert and then answer Question 2 (a) to (d) on this question paper.
(a) Identify a word or phrase from the text which suggests the same idea as the words underlined here:
(i) Marisol could hear a faint, scratchy sound of small movements coming from the songbird room. (paragraph 1) [1]
(ii) Dale cleared the seat for her with the politeness of a man who has stopped expecting to be thanked. (paragraph 3) [1]
(iii) Dale kept talking in a completely unchanging tone of voice. (paragraph 7) [1]
(iv) Under her hand she could feel the quick, shallow working of its lungs. (paragraph 8) [1]
(b) Using your own words, explain what the writer means by each of the words underlined in the sentence below:
"Mostly it is pigeons, dazed and compliant, but once it was a snapping turtle in a laundry basket, ancient and furious, its shell scored like an old dinner plate." (paragraph 2)
(i) dazed [1]
(ii) compliant [1]
(iii) scored [1]
(c) Use one example from the text below to explain how the writer suggests Marisol's feelings at the end of the night. Use your own words in your explanation.
"I have thought about that animal's face every week since. Not because it was sad: the center is full of sad. Not because we failed, although we did. It is the arithmetic." (paragraph 11)
[3]
(d) Re-read paragraph 5, which describes the drive north along Elston Avenue, and paragraph 6, which describes finding the coyote in the ditch.
Explain how the writer uses language to convey meaning and to create effect in these paragraphs. Choose three examples of words or phrases from each paragraph to support your answer. Your choices should include the use of imagery.
Write about 200 to 300 words.
Up to 15 marks are available for the content of your answer. [15]
[Total: 25]
Question 2 carries 25 marks: (a) four items at 1 mark, (b) three items at 1 mark, (c) 3 marks, (d) 15 marks. Parts (a) and (b) look alike and test opposite skills, so settle which direction you are traveling in before you write a word.
Part (a): find the writer's own wording [4 x 1 = 4]
The underlined words in the question are the examiner's paraphrase. They are deliberately not in Text C. Your task is to go to the named paragraph and quote the wording the writer actually used for that idea. Re-expressing the idea in your own words scores nothing here, because the skill being tested is location, not vocabulary.
How this part is marked. Credit the required core word or phrase whenever it is present and identifiable as the candidate's selection. Words surrounding it are neither required nor penalized, which is why each accepted answer below prints its optional context in brackets, the convention used in the published schemes. What is not creditable is an indiscriminate lift of a long stretch of text that fails to select anything.
| Paraphrase in the question | Accepted answer | Why it is the answer |
|---|---|---|
| (i) a faint, scratchy sound of small movements (paragraph 1) | (the) small dry rustle (from the songbird room) | "Rustle" is the precise noun for a light, papery, scratching sound; "dry" supplies the scratchiness and "small" the scale of the movements. The mark rests on "rustle" being selected. [1] |
| (ii) the politeness of a man who has stopped expecting to be thanked (paragraph 3) | (the) resigned courtesy (of a man who has done exactly this several thousand times) | Both words are needed. "Courtesy" is the politeness; "resigned" is the giving up of any expectation of thanks, which is why the paragraph has already told us he has driven for eleven years "without ever ... being thanked for it". "Courtesy" on its own does not carry the second half of the idea. [1] |
| (iii) in a completely unchanging tone of voice (paragraph 7) | at a level pitch (about nothing) | "Pitch" is the height of the voice and "level" means it neither rises nor falls, which is exactly "unchanging tone". Note that "about nothing" describes the content of Dale's talk, not its sound, so a candidate who offers only those words has not answered the question. [1] |
| (iv) the quick, shallow working of its lungs (paragraph 8) | the fast shallow bellows (of its breathing) | "Fast" and "shallow" match "quick" and "shallow" directly, and "bellows" is the writer's image for lungs squeezing air in and out. [1] |
Length is not what is judged; selection is. A quotation that runs a little longer than necessary still earns the mark, but an entire paragraph copied out in the hope that the answer lies somewhere inside it selects nothing and earns none.
Part (b): meanings in your own words [3 x 1 = 3]
The direction now reverses. These three words are in the text, and you must re-express each one as it is used in this sentence about what arrives at the intake desk at two in the morning. Repeating the word, or offering another grammatical form of it, earns nothing.
Part (c): one example, Marisol's feelings at the end of the night [3]
One example, properly opened up, not three quotations listed. The three marks are awarded for: selecting an apt example and quoting or clearly indicating it [1]; explaining accurately what the words mean [1]; giving a convincing account of the feeling they convey [1]. The explanation must be in your own words. A candidate who quotes several phrases and unpacks none of them cannot get past the first mark. The whole extract is the narrator's own reflection, so every phrase in it speaks about her feelings directly.
A full-mark response: The repeated "Not because" sets up two explanations and then rejects both. Sadness and failure are exactly the feelings anyone would expect after a night like this, and by naming them and pushing them aside the narrator shows that she has already argued the whole thing out with herself and found the obvious answers inadequate. What survives that argument is the coyote's calculating look, so the feeling conveyed is not grief but a lasting unease: she has been measured by a wild animal and found dangerous, and she cannot put the memory down. [3]
Other examples that reach the same standard, each worth the full three if opened up in the same way: "every week since" (the memory returns without being invited, so this is not a choice she is making); "the center is full of sad" (a flat, rationed phrase showing how carefully she now guards her own pity, and how suspicious she is of easy emotion); "although we did" (an unprotected admission of failure that she refuses to soften); "It is the arithmetic" (a short, blunt sentence that isolates the one detail she cannot dismiss, and picks up the "terrible arithmetic" of the animal's stare).
Part (d): language in paragraph 5 and paragraph 6 [15]
This is analysis, not retelling. Three choices are required from each paragraph and imagery must be among them, so a brilliant answer on the drive alone cannot reach the top range. For each choice, work in three steps: what the words literally say, what they make the reader see or feel, and why that word was chosen instead of the plain alternative.
Paragraph 5, the drive north up Elston:
Paragraph 6, finding the coyote:
The overview that lifts an answer into the top range is the relationship between the two paragraphs: paragraph 5 makes the city unreal and closes it in behind the van, and paragraph 6 then puts a thinking, judging animal at the center of that sealed space, so the writer has turned a rescue call into an encounter.
Mark ranges for (d):
An answer far outside 200 to 300 words is not penalized directly, but a very short one has no room to earn the top range and a very long one usually drifts into narrative.
Exam takeaway: in (a) select, do not copy; in (b) replace, do not repeat; in (d) never write that a phrase "makes it more descriptive". Name what the word literally means, then what it makes you see, and the mark follows.
Question 2 carries 25 marks: (a) four items at 1 mark, (b) three items at 1 mark, (c) 3 marks, (d) 15 marks. Parts (a) and (b) look alike and test opposite skills, so settle which direction you are traveling in before you write a word.
Part (a): find the writer's own wording [4 x 1 = 4]
The underlined words in the question are the examiner's paraphrase. They are deliberately not in Text C. Your task is to go to the named paragraph and quote the wording the writer actually used for that idea. Re-expressing the idea in your own words scores nothing here, because the skill being tested is location, not vocabulary.
How this part is marked. Credit the required core word or phrase whenever it is present and identifiable as the candidate's selection. Words surrounding it are neither required nor penalized, which is why each accepted answer below prints its optional context in brackets, the convention used in the published schemes. What is not creditable is an indiscriminate lift of a long stretch of text that fails to select anything.
| Paraphrase in the question | Accepted answer | Why it is the answer |
|---|---|---|
| (i) a faint, scratchy sound of small movements (paragraph 1) | (the) small dry rustle (from the songbird room) | "Rustle" is the precise noun for a light, papery, scratching sound; "dry" supplies the scratchiness and "small" the scale of the movements. The mark rests on "rustle" being selected. [1] |
| (ii) the politeness of a man who has stopped expecting to be thanked (paragraph 3) | (the) resigned courtesy (of a man who has done exactly this several thousand times) | Both words are needed. "Courtesy" is the politeness; "resigned" is the giving up of any expectation of thanks, which is why the paragraph has already told us he has driven for eleven years "without ever ... being thanked for it". "Courtesy" on its own does not carry the second half of the idea. [1] |
| (iii) in a completely unchanging tone of voice (paragraph 7) | at a level pitch (about nothing) | "Pitch" is the height of the voice and "level" means it neither rises nor falls, which is exactly "unchanging tone". Note that "about nothing" describes the content of Dale's talk, not its sound, so a candidate who offers only those words has not answered the question. [1] |
| (iv) the quick, shallow working of its lungs (paragraph 8) | the fast shallow bellows (of its breathing) | "Fast" and "shallow" match "quick" and "shallow" directly, and "bellows" is the writer's image for lungs squeezing air in and out. [1] |
Length is not what is judged; selection is. A quotation that runs a little longer than necessary still earns the mark, but an entire paragraph copied out in the hope that the answer lies somewhere inside it selects nothing and earns none.
Part (b): meanings in your own words [3 x 1 = 3]
The direction now reverses. These three words are in the text, and you must re-express each one as it is used in this sentence about what arrives at the intake desk at two in the morning. Repeating the word, or offering another grammatical form of it, earns nothing.
Part (c): one example, Marisol's feelings at the end of the night [3]
One example, properly opened up, not three quotations listed. The three marks are awarded for: selecting an apt example and quoting or clearly indicating it [1]; explaining accurately what the words mean [1]; giving a convincing account of the feeling they convey [1]. The explanation must be in your own words. A candidate who quotes several phrases and unpacks none of them cannot get past the first mark. The whole extract is the narrator's own reflection, so every phrase in it speaks about her feelings directly.
A full-mark response: The repeated "Not because" sets up two explanations and then rejects both. Sadness and failure are exactly the feelings anyone would expect after a night like this, and by naming them and pushing them aside the narrator shows that she has already argued the whole thing out with herself and found the obvious answers inadequate. What survives that argument is the coyote's calculating look, so the feeling conveyed is not grief but a lasting unease: she has been measured by a wild animal and found dangerous, and she cannot put the memory down. [3]
Other examples that reach the same standard, each worth the full three if opened up in the same way: "every week since" (the memory returns without being invited, so this is not a choice she is making); "the center is full of sad" (a flat, rationed phrase showing how carefully she now guards her own pity, and how suspicious she is of easy emotion); "although we did" (an unprotected admission of failure that she refuses to soften); "It is the arithmetic" (a short, blunt sentence that isolates the one detail she cannot dismiss, and picks up the "terrible arithmetic" of the animal's stare).
Part (d): language in paragraph 5 and paragraph 6 [15]
This is analysis, not retelling. Three choices are required from each paragraph and imagery must be among them, so a brilliant answer on the drive alone cannot reach the top range. For each choice, work in three steps: what the words literally say, what they make the reader see or feel, and why that word was chosen instead of the plain alternative.
Paragraph 5, the drive north up Elston:
Paragraph 6, finding the coyote:
The overview that lifts an answer into the top range is the relationship between the two paragraphs: paragraph 5 makes the city unreal and closes it in behind the van, and paragraph 6 then puts a thinking, judging animal at the center of that sealed space, so the writer has turned a rescue call into an encounter.
Mark ranges for (d):
An answer far outside 200 to 300 words is not penalized directly, but a very short one has no room to earn the top range and a very long one usually drifts into narrative.
Exam takeaway: in (a) select, do not copy; in (b) replace, do not repeat; in (d) never write that a phrase "makes it more descriptive". Name what the word literally means, then what it makes you see, and the mark follows.
Question 3 Report
Read Text A, Learning the City, in the insert and then answer Question 1 (a) to (e) on this question paper.
(a) Give two of the features of a city which, according to paragraph 3, are stitched together to form the landscape a coyote lives in. [1]
(b) Using your own words, explain what the writer means by each of the words or phrases in bold below.
Several studies have recorded coyotes waiting at a curb until a gap opens in the cars and then crossing at a steady trot rather than in a panic-stricken bolt. (paragraph 4)
(i) a panic-stricken bolt [2]
... the great majority of them involve animals that have been fed, deliberately or carelessly, until they lost their wariness. (paragraph 6)
(ii) lost their wariness [2]
(c) Re-read paragraphs 3 and 4. Give two ways in which the behavior of a coyote living in a city differs from the behavior of a coyote living in open country. [2]
(d) Re-read paragraph 5. Identify two facts the writer gives about coyote family life, and explain what these facts suggest about why removing one problem animal from a city so rarely works. [2]
(e) Using your own words, explain what the writer means in each of the following:
(i) "When settlers cleared wolves from the eastern half of the continent, they emptied a chair at the table, and the coyote sat down in it." (paragraph 2) [3]
(ii) "It asks something of residents that ordinance and trapping never did: attention." (paragraph 7) [3]
(f) According to Text B, The Case for Keeping Them Out, why do some people argue that wild animals should be actively discouraged from living in cities?
You must use continuous writing (not note form) and use your own words as far as possible.
Your summary should not be more than 120 words.
Up to 10 marks are available for the content of your answer and up to 5 marks for the quality of your writing. [15]
[Total: 30]
What Question 1 is testing. The whole question assesses reading, and the marks divide evenly: parts (a) to (e) are worth 15 marks for reading Text A for explicit and implicit meaning, and part (f) is worth 15 marks for selecting from Text B and summarizing it (10 for content, 5 for the quality of the writing). Two habits earn most of the marks here. The first is obeying the instruction "using your own words" wherever it appears, because an idea copied back in the writer's vocabulary is not evidence that you understood it. The second is reading the mark figure before writing: the number in brackets tells you how many separate ideas the examiner has to find, and almost every mark lost in this section is lost by supplying fewer ideas than the bracket asked for.
(a) Two features stitched together into the coyote's landscape [1]
This is pure retrieval, and the whole of it sits in the closing sentence of paragraph 3, which describes the city from the coyote's point of view as a warm, well-watered landscape with almost no hunters in it, "stitched together out of golf courses, cemeteries, railroad embankments and flood-control channels". Nothing needs to be explained or rephrased: the examiner wants the items themselves.
Model answer: Golf courses and cemeteries. Accept any two of golf courses, cemeteries, railroad embankments, flood-control channels. Both items must be correct for the single mark. [1]
The two tempting wrong answers come from misreading which sentence the question points at. The parking garage belongs to paragraph 1 and is where the photographed animal was heading, not part of the stitched landscape; the prairie appears in paragraph 3 only as the comparison the city beats ("more rabbits per acre than the prairie ever held"), so it is the opposite of a city feature.
(b) Own words for two phrases [2 + 2]
Own-words questions are marked by ideas, not by elegance, and a two-mark phrase always contains two separable ideas. The rule that decides most of these marks is that you may not re-use the key word you were asked to explain, or a word from the same family, because doing so simply hands the phrase back.
(i) "a panic-stricken bolt" splits at the hyphenated adjective and the noun. "Panic-stricken" supplies the emotion: overwhelming, uncontrollable fear. "Bolt" supplies the movement: one sudden, headlong dash. The surrounding sentence confirms both, because it sets the phrase against what the coyotes actually do, "crossing at a steady trot", so the phrase names the frightened, unplanned behavior the city animal has stopped showing.
Model answer: A sudden headlong rush made in complete terror, the animal running blindly instead of choosing its moment. 1 mark for the idea of extreme fear or terror; 1 mark for the idea of a sudden, uncontrolled rush or sprint. Reward "running away in a blind rush because it is frightened". "Panicking" or "bolting" score nothing for the idea they are meant to replace. [2]
(ii) "lost their wariness" splits the same way. "Wariness" is caution: watching for danger and keeping a distance from it. "Lost" says that this caution has gone, worn away by being fed, so the animal no longer treats a person as something to be careful about.
Model answer: They stopped being cautious around human beings and no longer treated them as a danger to watch out for. 1 mark for the idea of caution, watchfulness or suspicion; 1 mark for the idea that it has gone or been given up. [2]
"They are not scared of people any more" is worth 1 mark only. It captures the loss but converts wariness into plain fear, and wariness is alertness rather than fright: a wary animal is not terrified, it is keeping watch.
(c) Two ways city behavior differs from open-country behavior [2]
The command is "differs", so each mark needs the same feature described on both sides. An answer that only reports what city coyotes do has given half a difference; it is safer to write the contrast out than to hope the examiner infers the missing half.
Maximum 2 marks. A third answer defensible from paragraph 4 is that city pups perform the traffic behavior from their first season, so the skill is taught by the parents rather than reinvented by each animal, which is itself a difference between city-born and country-born coyotes. Treat the smaller, more sharply drawn territories with caution: that is a genuine difference, but it comes from paragraph 5, and this question names paragraphs 3 and 4. Credit it if it is accurately expressed, but do not present it to candidates as one of the two intended answers.
(d) Two facts about family life, and what they explain [2]
This is a two-stage question and the marks follow the two stages: one mark for the facts, one mark for the inference drawn from them. A candidate who lists facts accurately but never connects them to the failure of removal is capped at 1, and so is a candidate who asserts that removal fails without grounding it in paragraph 5.
The creditable facts are all in paragraph 5: coyotes are genuinely monogamous, which is rare among mammals; a bonded pair holds and defends the same territory of two to five square miles for years; city territories are smaller and more sharply drawn because the food in them is concentrated; the pups stay through their first winter; those pups help raise the litter that follows.
Model answer: Coyotes pair for life and a bonded pair holds the same territory for years, and their pups stay through the first winter and help to raise the next litter. Because the arrangement is stable and keeps producing grown offspring who need ground of their own, a territory left empty in a food-rich city is claimed by a new pair within weeks, so killing one animal changes nothing. 1 mark for two accurate facts, 1 mark for the explanation that a vacancy in good habitat is refilled quickly. [2]
The reasoning worth teaching is that the territory, not the animal, is the resource. Removal takes away one occupant of a good piece of ground while leaving the ground, its food and the line of young adults looking for it exactly as they were, which is why the population absorbs the loss without changing.
(e) Own words for two images, three ideas each [3 + 3]
These are the parts that separate the strongest scripts from the rest. Three marks signals three separable ideas, and a figurative sentence has to be converted into literal terms: re-describing the picture, or admiring it as a nice image, earns nothing.
(i) "When settlers cleared wolves from the eastern half of the continent, they emptied a chair at the table, and the coyote sat down in it." The image is a dinner table with a fixed number of seats, so each part of the sentence carries one ecological idea.
An answer that says only "the coyote replaced the wolf" has one idea and one mark. The three parts of the sentence are the three marks, and separating them out is the whole technique.
(ii) "It asks something of residents that ordinance and trapping never did: attention." The sentence works by contrast between two eras of policy, so the ideas divide into what the old approach required, what the new one requires, and where the responsibility ends up.
The verb "asks" is the word doing the work. It turns wildlife management from something done to animals into something requested of people, and "attention", held back to the end of the sentence for emphasis, names an ongoing effort rather than a one-time action.
(f) Summary of Text B [15: 10 content + 5 writing]
The question asks one thing only: why some people argue that wild animals should be actively discouraged from cities. Text A is therefore out of bounds. Coyote diet, nocturnal habits and monogamy are interesting, correct and worth nothing here, and every word spent on them is a word taken from a 120-word budget. Content marks are awarded at one mark per separate point, up to 10.
Text B carries more creditable points than there are marks, so the skill being tested is selection and compression rather than exhaustiveness:
| Text B | Creditable point |
|---|---|
| 1 | Tolerance is a trap for the animal itself: one that is fed loses its fear of people, and a bold animal is eventually destroyed by the same city that admired it. |
| 2 | Dense urban populations are permanent reservoirs of disease (rabies, leptospirosis, raccoon roundworm), with a short route to a family dog or a child in a sandbox. |
| 2 | Pets are taken: cats and small dogs vanish from fenced yards every spring. |
| 2 | That loss falls on individual households, not on the agencies that set the policy. |
| 3 | Property is damaged: roofs opened, wiring chewed, porches undermined, a year of gardening stripped in a night. |
| 3 | Cities carry unbudgeted expense for reinforced containers, removal contracts and emergency calls. |
| 3 | The populations are subsidized rather than natural, surviving at densities several times what a forest could support only because of human food and water. |
| 3 | Those inflated numbers press on smaller creatures, and songbirds, turtles and ground-nesting species are eaten out of neighborhoods where the predators have no rivals. |
| 4 | The burden is unfairly shared: older districts with alley collection, absentee landlords and no wheeled bins carry far more of it than the leafy neighborhoods where the policies are designed. |
| 4 | Serious attacks, though rare, almost always involve habituated animals and disproportionately involve small children, which is not a risk a city is entitled to accept on a resident's behalf. |
| 5 | Coexistence is doubted on its own terms: hazing moves the labor onto residents and needs near-total compliance, and one neighbor who puts food out undoes a whole block's discipline. |
| 5 | Roads kill thousands of animals a year and injure drivers who swerve to avoid them. |
| 5 | Urban wildlife flatters a city, letting it feel it is conserving nature while the habitat that matters is cleared a hundred miles away, and drawing attention and money away from protected land. |
Mark each of these as a separate point when a candidate expresses it separately. In particular, road deaths and the charge that urban wildlife diverts money and attention from real habitat are two different arguments, and the cost falling on households rather than agencies is a point about fairness that stands apart from the loss of the pets themselves. Since only 10 marks are available, grouping them more tightly rarely changes a total, but it can under-credit a candidate who has genuinely found more.
Writing (5 marks). The writing mark rewards compression and independence from the original wording, not vocabulary for its own sake.
| Marks | Descriptor |
|---|---|
| 5 | Consistently concise and fluent, wholly in the candidate's own words, well organized, within the word limit. |
| 4 | Mostly own words and well ordered, with occasional lifting. |
| 3 | Some own words but noticeable copying of phrases; order adequate. |
| 2 | Substantial lifting; list-like or note form in places. |
| 1 | Mainly copied from the text. |
| 0 | No attempt at continuous writing. |
A lifted sentence still earns its content mark but pulls the writing mark down, so copying is a poor trade: it saves no marks and costs several.
Model answer (119 words): Critics say tolerance traps the animals: those that stop fearing people are eventually destroyed. Crowded urban populations hold diseases reaching pets and children easily, cats and small dogs disappear from yards, with families, not officials, absorbing that loss. Wildlife wrecks roofs, wiring, porches and gardens, while cities pay unbudgeted bills for containers, contractors and emergency calls. Numbers are artificially high because people feed them, so inflated predator numbers strip out songbirds and other small species. Poorer districts suffer most, rare attacks usually involve tamed animals and young children, and hazing needs compliance no street achieves. Roads kill thousands and injure drivers, and, worst of all, urban wildlife lets cities feel conservationist while the habitat that matters is destroyed elsewhere. [15]
Three things make that answer work. It carries more than ten points in the space, so rejecting one of them still leaves full content marks. It compresses by generalizing rather than by listing, turning "rabies, leptospirosis and raccoon roundworm" into "diseases" because the examples are illustration, not argument. And it does its joining with ordinary connectives ("since", "while", "so", "worst of all"), which is how a summary stays continuous prose instead of drifting into notes.
Examination takeaway. Let the mark figure decide the shape of the answer before you write a word. One mark means lift the exact detail. Two marks mean two ideas, or the same feature stated on both sides of a contrast. Three marks mean three separable ideas pulled out of one image and translated into plain terms. Ten content marks in 120 words means about one point every twelve words, which is only achievable if you plan which points to take and then generalize away the examples.
What Question 1 is testing. The whole question assesses reading, and the marks divide evenly: parts (a) to (e) are worth 15 marks for reading Text A for explicit and implicit meaning, and part (f) is worth 15 marks for selecting from Text B and summarizing it (10 for content, 5 for the quality of the writing). Two habits earn most of the marks here. The first is obeying the instruction "using your own words" wherever it appears, because an idea copied back in the writer's vocabulary is not evidence that you understood it. The second is reading the mark figure before writing: the number in brackets tells you how many separate ideas the examiner has to find, and almost every mark lost in this section is lost by supplying fewer ideas than the bracket asked for.
(a) Two features stitched together into the coyote's landscape [1]
This is pure retrieval, and the whole of it sits in the closing sentence of paragraph 3, which describes the city from the coyote's point of view as a warm, well-watered landscape with almost no hunters in it, "stitched together out of golf courses, cemeteries, railroad embankments and flood-control channels". Nothing needs to be explained or rephrased: the examiner wants the items themselves.
Model answer: Golf courses and cemeteries. Accept any two of golf courses, cemeteries, railroad embankments, flood-control channels. Both items must be correct for the single mark. [1]
The two tempting wrong answers come from misreading which sentence the question points at. The parking garage belongs to paragraph 1 and is where the photographed animal was heading, not part of the stitched landscape; the prairie appears in paragraph 3 only as the comparison the city beats ("more rabbits per acre than the prairie ever held"), so it is the opposite of a city feature.
(b) Own words for two phrases [2 + 2]
Own-words questions are marked by ideas, not by elegance, and a two-mark phrase always contains two separable ideas. The rule that decides most of these marks is that you may not re-use the key word you were asked to explain, or a word from the same family, because doing so simply hands the phrase back.
(i) "a panic-stricken bolt" splits at the hyphenated adjective and the noun. "Panic-stricken" supplies the emotion: overwhelming, uncontrollable fear. "Bolt" supplies the movement: one sudden, headlong dash. The surrounding sentence confirms both, because it sets the phrase against what the coyotes actually do, "crossing at a steady trot", so the phrase names the frightened, unplanned behavior the city animal has stopped showing.
Model answer: A sudden headlong rush made in complete terror, the animal running blindly instead of choosing its moment. 1 mark for the idea of extreme fear or terror; 1 mark for the idea of a sudden, uncontrolled rush or sprint. Reward "running away in a blind rush because it is frightened". "Panicking" or "bolting" score nothing for the idea they are meant to replace. [2]
(ii) "lost their wariness" splits the same way. "Wariness" is caution: watching for danger and keeping a distance from it. "Lost" says that this caution has gone, worn away by being fed, so the animal no longer treats a person as something to be careful about.
Model answer: They stopped being cautious around human beings and no longer treated them as a danger to watch out for. 1 mark for the idea of caution, watchfulness or suspicion; 1 mark for the idea that it has gone or been given up. [2]
"They are not scared of people any more" is worth 1 mark only. It captures the loss but converts wariness into plain fear, and wariness is alertness rather than fright: a wary animal is not terrified, it is keeping watch.
(c) Two ways city behavior differs from open-country behavior [2]
The command is "differs", so each mark needs the same feature described on both sides. An answer that only reports what city coyotes do has given half a difference; it is safer to write the contrast out than to hope the examiner infers the missing half.
Maximum 2 marks. A third answer defensible from paragraph 4 is that city pups perform the traffic behavior from their first season, so the skill is taught by the parents rather than reinvented by each animal, which is itself a difference between city-born and country-born coyotes. Treat the smaller, more sharply drawn territories with caution: that is a genuine difference, but it comes from paragraph 5, and this question names paragraphs 3 and 4. Credit it if it is accurately expressed, but do not present it to candidates as one of the two intended answers.
(d) Two facts about family life, and what they explain [2]
This is a two-stage question and the marks follow the two stages: one mark for the facts, one mark for the inference drawn from them. A candidate who lists facts accurately but never connects them to the failure of removal is capped at 1, and so is a candidate who asserts that removal fails without grounding it in paragraph 5.
The creditable facts are all in paragraph 5: coyotes are genuinely monogamous, which is rare among mammals; a bonded pair holds and defends the same territory of two to five square miles for years; city territories are smaller and more sharply drawn because the food in them is concentrated; the pups stay through their first winter; those pups help raise the litter that follows.
Model answer: Coyotes pair for life and a bonded pair holds the same territory for years, and their pups stay through the first winter and help to raise the next litter. Because the arrangement is stable and keeps producing grown offspring who need ground of their own, a territory left empty in a food-rich city is claimed by a new pair within weeks, so killing one animal changes nothing. 1 mark for two accurate facts, 1 mark for the explanation that a vacancy in good habitat is refilled quickly. [2]
The reasoning worth teaching is that the territory, not the animal, is the resource. Removal takes away one occupant of a good piece of ground while leaving the ground, its food and the line of young adults looking for it exactly as they were, which is why the population absorbs the loss without changing.
(e) Own words for two images, three ideas each [3 + 3]
These are the parts that separate the strongest scripts from the rest. Three marks signals three separable ideas, and a figurative sentence has to be converted into literal terms: re-describing the picture, or admiring it as a nice image, earns nothing.
(i) "When settlers cleared wolves from the eastern half of the continent, they emptied a chair at the table, and the coyote sat down in it." The image is a dinner table with a fixed number of seats, so each part of the sentence carries one ecological idea.
An answer that says only "the coyote replaced the wolf" has one idea and one mark. The three parts of the sentence are the three marks, and separating them out is the whole technique.
(ii) "It asks something of residents that ordinance and trapping never did: attention." The sentence works by contrast between two eras of policy, so the ideas divide into what the old approach required, what the new one requires, and where the responsibility ends up.
The verb "asks" is the word doing the work. It turns wildlife management from something done to animals into something requested of people, and "attention", held back to the end of the sentence for emphasis, names an ongoing effort rather than a one-time action.
(f) Summary of Text B [15: 10 content + 5 writing]
The question asks one thing only: why some people argue that wild animals should be actively discouraged from cities. Text A is therefore out of bounds. Coyote diet, nocturnal habits and monogamy are interesting, correct and worth nothing here, and every word spent on them is a word taken from a 120-word budget. Content marks are awarded at one mark per separate point, up to 10.
Text B carries more creditable points than there are marks, so the skill being tested is selection and compression rather than exhaustiveness:
| Text B | Creditable point |
|---|---|
| 1 | Tolerance is a trap for the animal itself: one that is fed loses its fear of people, and a bold animal is eventually destroyed by the same city that admired it. |
| 2 | Dense urban populations are permanent reservoirs of disease (rabies, leptospirosis, raccoon roundworm), with a short route to a family dog or a child in a sandbox. |
| 2 | Pets are taken: cats and small dogs vanish from fenced yards every spring. |
| 2 | That loss falls on individual households, not on the agencies that set the policy. |
| 3 | Property is damaged: roofs opened, wiring chewed, porches undermined, a year of gardening stripped in a night. |
| 3 | Cities carry unbudgeted expense for reinforced containers, removal contracts and emergency calls. |
| 3 | The populations are subsidized rather than natural, surviving at densities several times what a forest could support only because of human food and water. |
| 3 | Those inflated numbers press on smaller creatures, and songbirds, turtles and ground-nesting species are eaten out of neighborhoods where the predators have no rivals. |
| 4 | The burden is unfairly shared: older districts with alley collection, absentee landlords and no wheeled bins carry far more of it than the leafy neighborhoods where the policies are designed. |
| 4 | Serious attacks, though rare, almost always involve habituated animals and disproportionately involve small children, which is not a risk a city is entitled to accept on a resident's behalf. |
| 5 | Coexistence is doubted on its own terms: hazing moves the labor onto residents and needs near-total compliance, and one neighbor who puts food out undoes a whole block's discipline. |
| 5 | Roads kill thousands of animals a year and injure drivers who swerve to avoid them. |
| 5 | Urban wildlife flatters a city, letting it feel it is conserving nature while the habitat that matters is cleared a hundred miles away, and drawing attention and money away from protected land. |
Mark each of these as a separate point when a candidate expresses it separately. In particular, road deaths and the charge that urban wildlife diverts money and attention from real habitat are two different arguments, and the cost falling on households rather than agencies is a point about fairness that stands apart from the loss of the pets themselves. Since only 10 marks are available, grouping them more tightly rarely changes a total, but it can under-credit a candidate who has genuinely found more.
Writing (5 marks). The writing mark rewards compression and independence from the original wording, not vocabulary for its own sake.
| Marks | Descriptor |
|---|---|
| 5 | Consistently concise and fluent, wholly in the candidate's own words, well organized, within the word limit. |
| 4 | Mostly own words and well ordered, with occasional lifting. |
| 3 | Some own words but noticeable copying of phrases; order adequate. |
| 2 | Substantial lifting; list-like or note form in places. |
| 1 | Mainly copied from the text. |
| 0 | No attempt at continuous writing. |
A lifted sentence still earns its content mark but pulls the writing mark down, so copying is a poor trade: it saves no marks and costs several.
Model answer (119 words): Critics say tolerance traps the animals: those that stop fearing people are eventually destroyed. Crowded urban populations hold diseases reaching pets and children easily, cats and small dogs disappear from yards, with families, not officials, absorbing that loss. Wildlife wrecks roofs, wiring, porches and gardens, while cities pay unbudgeted bills for containers, contractors and emergency calls. Numbers are artificially high because people feed them, so inflated predator numbers strip out songbirds and other small species. Poorer districts suffer most, rare attacks usually involve tamed animals and young children, and hazing needs compliance no street achieves. Roads kill thousands and injure drivers, and, worst of all, urban wildlife lets cities feel conservationist while the habitat that matters is destroyed elsewhere. [15]
Three things make that answer work. It carries more than ten points in the space, so rejecting one of them still leaves full content marks. It compresses by generalizing rather than by listing, turning "rabies, leptospirosis and raccoon roundworm" into "diseases" because the examples are illustration, not argument. And it does its joining with ordinary connectives ("since", "while", "so", "worst of all"), which is how a summary stays continuous prose instead of drifting into notes.
Examination takeaway. Let the mark figure decide the shape of the answer before you write a word. One mark means lift the exact detail. Two marks mean two ideas, or the same feature stated on both sides of a contrast. Three marks mean three separable ideas pulled out of one image and translated into plain terms. Ten content marks in 120 words means about one point every twelve words, which is only achievable if you plan which points to take and then generalize away the examples.
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