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Instruction
Source A
The lane that changed a city
When the council closed the eastern side of Meadow Street to cars three years ago, the objections filled four evenings of public meetings. Shopkeepers said their customers would vanish. Taxi drivers said the traffic would simply move to the next street and sit there.
The lane opened in April. By the following spring the counters buried in the tarmac were recording eleven thousand bicycles a week, four times the number using the old painted strip beside the buses.
What surprised the planners was who was riding. The painted strip had been used almost entirely by men between twenty and forty. The new lane, separated from traffic by a low kerb, carried children on the way to school, delivery riders, and a steady flow of people over sixty.
The shopkeepers' takings did not fall. A survey of forty businesses on the street found that spending rose by nine per cent, because people arriving by bicycle came more often and stayed longer, even though each visit was smaller.
The traffic did move to the next street, for about seven months. Then it thinned again, as some of those drivers gave up on the car for short trips altogether.
Instruction
Source B
Two wheels to school
Fewer than one child in twenty now cycles to school in this country, down from roughly one in four a generation ago. The reasons given by parents are almost always the same: the roads are too busy and the drivers are too fast.
Schools that have reversed the decline have done it by dealing with the road rather than the child. One primary school in the north closed its own gate to cars at drop-off and opened a route through a park. Cycling rose from six pupils to ninety in two terms.
The gains are not only in fitness, although those are real. Teachers at the same school reported that pupils who arrived by bicycle settled to work faster in the first lesson, and the school's own attendance figures improved slightly in the winter months.
There is a further benefit that is easy to miss. A child who cycles to school learns the geography of the place they live in. They know which street floods, where the hill is, how long things take. A child driven the same route for seven years knows almost none of it.
Instruction
Source C
We are still building cities for the wrong machine
I have been cycling in this city for twenty-two years, and I have watched the argument go round so many times that I can predict the shape of it before anybody speaks.
Someone will say that cyclists run red lights. Some do, and they should not. Then someone will say that cyclists do not pay road tax, which has not existed since 1937. Then, eventually, someone will say that this city is simply not built for bicycles, and that is the sentence I want to take apart.
No city is built for bicycles. Amsterdam was not built for bicycles. In 1971 it was choking on cars and losing more than three thousand people a year to road deaths, four hundred of them children. What changed was not the shape of the streets but a decision about who the streets were for.
We repeat that we cannot afford to change. We are already paying. We pay in air that measurably shortens lives, in children who are driven everywhere and then diagnosed as inactive, in the space we surrender to parked metal that sits unused for twenty-three hours a day.
I am not asking anyone to love cycling. I am asking for the honest question to be put: not whether this city is built for bicycles, but who we decided it was built for, and whether we still agree.
Instruction
Source D
The case for the electric bicycle
An electric bicycle flattens hills, and hills are the reason most people give up. Riders who switch to one typically travel three times as far each week as they did on an ordinary bicycle, and they keep going through the winter.
They also change who can ride at all. Delivery riders carry loads that would be impossible otherwise, and people in their seventies return to cycling after twenty years away. Arriving without needing to change your shirt turns out to matter enormously.
Source E
Slow down before you buy one
An electric bicycle costs between three and ten times what a good ordinary one costs, and the battery, which is the expensive part, will need replacing after a few years. Very few can be repaired at a local shop.
There is a safety question too. These machines are heavier and hold speed uphill, where drivers do not expect it, and riders often have no experience of the roads. And a bicycle that removes the effort removes some of the health benefit that was the point.
Instruction
Source F
Six in the morning, going east
The city at six is a different country, and the fastest way to see it is from a saddle.
I go out through the park gates while the grass is still grey, and for the first ten minutes the only sounds are my own tyres and the crows arguing in the plane trees. The air over the boating lake is cold enough to taste.
Then the bridge, where the road tips down and the whole eastern half of the city opens out below in a low brown haze, the cranes standing in it like wading birds. This is the only minute of the day when I can see all of it at once.
On the far side the bakery vents are already going, and the smell arrives about thirty metres before the building does, warm and yeasty and slightly burnt at the edges. A man in an apron lifts a hand without looking up.
By the market the streets have started to fill. Crates come off a lorry in a chain of arms. Somebody is hosing the fish stall. A pigeon walks out in front of me with the unhurried confidence of something that has never been hurried in its life.
I stop at the top of Cutler's Hill because I always stop there, and the city makes the sound it makes at that hour, which is not traffic and not quiet, but something between the two, like a room where people are beginning to wake up.
Instruction
Section B: Directed writing
Answer one question from this section. You may use information from the sources in Section A as well as your own ideas.
Question 1 Report
The writer of Source C asks who we decided our streets were built for. Write your response to the writer in which you give your views about how cities should be shared between cars, bicycles and people on foot. You may use information from the sources in Section A as well as your own ideas.
This is a Section B directed-writing task worth 40 marks, assessed on content and organisation together with vocabulary, sentence structure and technical accuracy (W1 to W4). You answer one Section B question, not both.
What the task demands
A response to a named writer, so form matters as much as argument. You are answering a person who has made a specific case, and the marks for register come from sustaining that address without becoming a letter of complaint or drifting into a general essay. The question he asked, who we decided the streets were built for, is the thing to answer.
Reaching Band 5 (33 to 40)
What holds a piece in Band 3 (17 to 24)
A general essay about pollution that never addresses the writer. Agreement without argument, which produces a summary of Source C rather than a response. Repetitive openings such as 'Another reason is'. And unsupported claims about accidents or costs that the sources do not contain.
Technical accuracy
One idea per paragraph with a topic sentence. Band 5 requires secure accuracy, so leave time to check sentence demarcation.
This is a Section B directed-writing task worth 40 marks, assessed on content and organisation together with vocabulary, sentence structure and technical accuracy (W1 to W4). You answer one Section B question, not both.
What the task demands
A response to a named writer, so form matters as much as argument. You are answering a person who has made a specific case, and the marks for register come from sustaining that address without becoming a letter of complaint or drifting into a general essay. The question he asked, who we decided the streets were built for, is the thing to answer.
Reaching Band 5 (33 to 40)
What holds a piece in Band 3 (17 to 24)
A general essay about pollution that never addresses the writer. Agreement without argument, which produces a summary of Source C rather than a response. Repetitive openings such as 'Another reason is'. And unsupported claims about accidents or costs that the sources do not contain.
Technical accuracy
One idea per paragraph with a topic sentence. Band 5 requires secure accuracy, so leave time to check sentence demarcation.
Question 2 Report
Read Source B. Explain the benefits of cycling to school, according to the article.
This question tests retrieval and the writer's methods together (R1 and R3), for 6 marks. The command word is 'Explain', so each benefit must be stated and accounted for.
1 to 2 marks: isolated detail
Cycling improves fitness; ninety pupils cycled after two terms.
3 to 4 marks: detail with comment
The benefits reach past health, and the article is careful to concede the obvious one first, noting that the fitness gains are real before moving on. Teachers reported that pupils arriving by bicycle settled to work faster in the first lesson, and winter attendance improved slightly. Both are second-order effects, which is why they are worth reporting.
5 to 6 marks: developed explanation
The top band belongs to answers that follow the article's actual argument, which is about the road rather than the child. Parents give the same two reasons everywhere, that roads are too busy and drivers too fast, and the school that reversed the decline acted on exactly that: it closed its own gate to cars and opened a route through a park. Cycling then rose from six pupils to ninety. Nothing was done to persuade anybody.
The final benefit is the least expected and should be used, because it is the one that shows real reading. A child who cycles learns the geography of where they live, which street floods, where the hill is, how long things take, while a child driven the same route for seven years knows almost none of it. That is a claim about knowledge rather than health, and quoting it demonstrates that you followed the article to its end rather than stopping at the statistics.
Where marks are lost
Listing benefits without attaching the article's reasoning. 'It is good exercise and good for the environment' could be written without reading the source at all, and a source-based question is testing whether you did.
This question tests retrieval and the writer's methods together (R1 and R3), for 6 marks. The command word is 'Explain', so each benefit must be stated and accounted for.
1 to 2 marks: isolated detail
Cycling improves fitness; ninety pupils cycled after two terms.
3 to 4 marks: detail with comment
The benefits reach past health, and the article is careful to concede the obvious one first, noting that the fitness gains are real before moving on. Teachers reported that pupils arriving by bicycle settled to work faster in the first lesson, and winter attendance improved slightly. Both are second-order effects, which is why they are worth reporting.
5 to 6 marks: developed explanation
The top band belongs to answers that follow the article's actual argument, which is about the road rather than the child. Parents give the same two reasons everywhere, that roads are too busy and drivers too fast, and the school that reversed the decline acted on exactly that: it closed its own gate to cars and opened a route through a park. Cycling then rose from six pupils to ninety. Nothing was done to persuade anybody.
The final benefit is the least expected and should be used, because it is the one that shows real reading. A child who cycles learns the geography of where they live, which street floods, where the hill is, how long things take, while a child driven the same route for seven years knows almost none of it. That is a claim about knowledge rather than health, and quoting it demonstrates that you followed the article to its end rather than stopping at the statistics.
Where marks are lost
Listing benefits without attaching the article's reasoning. 'It is good exercise and good for the environment' could be written without reading the source at all, and a source-based question is testing whether you did.
Question 3 Report
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
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.
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
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.
Question 4 Report
Read Source A. What do you learn about the Meadow Street cycle lane from the article?
This question tests reading for information (R1) on one short source, for 5 marks. The mark scheme divides at inference: retrieving what the article says reaches 3, saying what those facts amount to reaches 5.
The retrievable detail [1 to 3]
Reaching 4 to 5 marks
Where marks are lost
Copying the numbers without saying what they show. Note also that the objections are evidence here, not background: the article is structured as a list of predictions followed by what actually happened, and answering it means using both halves.
Examination takeaway
On a five-mark source question, look for the sentence that explains a statistic rather than states it. That sentence is almost always where the top-band mark is.
This question tests reading for information (R1) on one short source, for 5 marks. The mark scheme divides at inference: retrieving what the article says reaches 3, saying what those facts amount to reaches 5.
The retrievable detail [1 to 3]
Reaching 4 to 5 marks
Where marks are lost
Copying the numbers without saying what they show. Note also that the objections are evidence here, not background: the article is structured as a list of predictions followed by what actually happened, and answering it means using both halves.
Examination takeaway
On a five-mark source question, look for the sentence that explains a statistic rather than states it. That sentence is almost always where the top-band mark is.
Question 5 Report
Read Source C. Examine how the writer presents his views on cycling in cities.
This question tests analysis of language and its effect (R4), for 9 marks. 'Examine how the writer presents his views' means the marks are in the construction of the argument, not in whether you agree with it.
1 to 3 marks: identification
Noting that the writer supports cycling and uses an example from Amsterdam, without analysing the effect.
4 to 6 marks: explaining how the views are conveyed
7 to 9 marks: evaluation
The evaluative move is to see why Amsterdam is the right example rather than an obvious one. He opens by conceding his opponent's premise entirely: no city is built for bicycles, Amsterdam included. Having agreed, he can then supply the 1971 figures, three thousand road deaths a year and four hundred of them children, and conclude that what changed was not the shape of the streets but a decision about who the streets were for. The concession is what makes the example unanswerable.
His second technique is to reverse the cost argument. Against the claim that we cannot afford to change, he lists what is already being paid: air that measurably shortens lives, children driven everywhere and then diagnosed as inactive, and space surrendered to parked metal that sits unused for twenty-three hours a day. The reader is not asked to spend, only to notice existing spending.
The close is the sharpest choice in the piece. He explicitly declines to ask anyone to love cycling, which narrows his demand to a single question about who we decided the streets were for. A request for sympathy can be refused; a question about a past decision has to be answered.
This question tests analysis of language and its effect (R4), for 9 marks. 'Examine how the writer presents his views' means the marks are in the construction of the argument, not in whether you agree with it.
1 to 3 marks: identification
Noting that the writer supports cycling and uses an example from Amsterdam, without analysing the effect.
4 to 6 marks: explaining how the views are conveyed
7 to 9 marks: evaluation
The evaluative move is to see why Amsterdam is the right example rather than an obvious one. He opens by conceding his opponent's premise entirely: no city is built for bicycles, Amsterdam included. Having agreed, he can then supply the 1971 figures, three thousand road deaths a year and four hundred of them children, and conclude that what changed was not the shape of the streets but a decision about who the streets were for. The concession is what makes the example unanswerable.
His second technique is to reverse the cost argument. Against the claim that we cannot afford to change, he lists what is already being paid: air that measurably shortens lives, children driven everywhere and then diagnosed as inactive, and space surrendered to parked metal that sits unused for twenty-three hours a day. The reader is not asked to spend, only to notice existing spending.
The close is the sharpest choice in the piece. He explicitly declines to ask anyone to love cycling, which narrows his demand to a single question about who we decided the streets were for. A request for sympathy can be refused; a question about a past decision has to be answered.
Question 6 Report
Read Source D and Source E. Explain the benefits and disadvantages of electric bicycles in these articles.
This question tests retrieval and collation across two sources (R1 and R2), for 10 marks. Both sources must be used, and the top band asks what the disagreement between them actually is.
1 to 3 marks: one source only
Even excellent work on Source D alone stays here. The question names both.
4 to 7 marks: collating both sides
| Benefits (Source D) | Disadvantages (Source E) |
|---|---|
| Flattens hills, which is the reason most people give up | Costs three to ten times an ordinary bicycle |
| Riders travel three times as far each week and keep going through winter | The battery is the expensive part and needs replacing after a few years |
| Lets delivery riders carry loads and returns people in their seventies to cycling | Very few can be repaired at a local shop |
| Arriving without needing to change your shirt | Heavier, and holds speed uphill where drivers do not expect it |
8 to 10 marks: developed comparison
The top band wants the shape of the disagreement, and the interesting thing here is that the two sources do not contradict each other on any fact. They differ on what follows.
The clearest case is effort. Source D treats the removal of effort as the whole point, because it is what allows people who had given up, or who never started, to ride at all. Source E treats the same removal as subtracting the health benefit that was the reason for cycling in the first place. One feature, two opposite readings, and neither is wrong.
Underneath that sits a difference in what each source is measuring. Source D measures success by who can now ride, so its evidence is about range, loads and age. Source E measures by cost and risk, so its evidence is about price, repairability and speed. An answer that says the sources disagree about which question matters, rather than about the machine, is working at 9 or 10.
Examination takeaway
On a two-source question, after listing both sides, ask what each writer counts as success. That single sentence usually earns the difference between the middle and the top band.
This question tests retrieval and collation across two sources (R1 and R2), for 10 marks. Both sources must be used, and the top band asks what the disagreement between them actually is.
1 to 3 marks: one source only
Even excellent work on Source D alone stays here. The question names both.
4 to 7 marks: collating both sides
| Benefits (Source D) | Disadvantages (Source E) |
|---|---|
| Flattens hills, which is the reason most people give up | Costs three to ten times an ordinary bicycle |
| Riders travel three times as far each week and keep going through winter | The battery is the expensive part and needs replacing after a few years |
| Lets delivery riders carry loads and returns people in their seventies to cycling | Very few can be repaired at a local shop |
| Arriving without needing to change your shirt | Heavier, and holds speed uphill where drivers do not expect it |
8 to 10 marks: developed comparison
The top band wants the shape of the disagreement, and the interesting thing here is that the two sources do not contradict each other on any fact. They differ on what follows.
The clearest case is effort. Source D treats the removal of effort as the whole point, because it is what allows people who had given up, or who never started, to ride at all. Source E treats the same removal as subtracting the health benefit that was the reason for cycling in the first place. One feature, two opposite readings, and neither is wrong.
Underneath that sits a difference in what each source is measuring. Source D measures success by who can now ride, so its evidence is about range, loads and age. Source E measures by cost and risk, so its evidence is about price, repairability and speed. An answer that says the sources disagree about which question matters, rather than about the machine, is working at 9 or 10.
Examination takeaway
On a two-source question, after listing both sides, ask what each writer counts as success. That single sentence usually earns the difference between the middle and the top band.
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