Question A: The 50-Mark Sprint
Dara has 50 minutes left for Question A on Paper 1: a two-page magazine feature titled 'The Four-Day Week: Miracle or Marketing?', followed by three comprehension questions and a functional writing task worth 25 marks. The article reports impressive trial results but suggests the gains may come from the novelty of being watched. The questions are: (a) 'Give three arguments made by supporters of the four-day week'; (b) 'Identify the writer's tone in paragraph 4 and support your answer with reference to the text'; (c) 'Write a letter to the editor of a national newspaper in which you respond to this article.' Dara reads the article once, underlines most of page one, and starts with (a), spending 22 minutes there. His tone answer reads: 'The tone is sarcastic.' His letter opens: 'Hey Editor, I read your article and I think it's totally wrong, because everyone I know would love a four-day week.' He plans to add a statistic he half-remembers: 'studies show productivity rises by 40%.' Twenty-eight minutes remain.
1. Map Dara's 50 minutes and justify the allocation.
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Question A is 50 marks split between comprehension and functional writing. Treat each half as worth half the time.
Suggested map: 6 minutes reading the text once with a pencil, numbering paragraphs and marking one or two key phrases per paragraph rather than underlining whole pages - underlined pages are unusable in an exam because you cannot find anything in them at speed. Then 18–20 minutes on the comprehension: (a) is retrieval and needs three short bullet points with no preamble; (b) needs a named tone, two short quotations and a sentence of explanation each, about five minutes. Then 20 minutes on the letter: two planning, fifteen writing, three checking.
Reasoning - marks per minute. Twenty-two minutes on (a) buys nothing: a third argument scores the same with or without an introduction. Meanwhile the letter, worth 25 marks on its own, was heading for a ten-minute rush. If time runs short, the functional writing is the part to protect rather than sacrifice: it is a quarter of Question A and is marked on identifiable features - clarity of purpose, coherence, register, mechanics - so time invested there converts to marks more reliably than extra sentences in a retrieval answer.
2. Diagnose the letter's opening and rewrite it in two or three sentences.
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Fault one - register. 'Hey Editor' addresses the editor as a friend, which misreads the audience. A letter to the editor is published for readers; the editor is only the gatekeeper. 'Totally wrong' is a verdict without an argument, and 'everyone I know' is the weakest available evidence: anecdote offered as proof.
Fault two - purpose. The letter never says what it wants. It should engage with the article's actual claim - that the gains may be a novelty effect - not deny a claim the article never made.
Rewrite: 'Sir/Madam - Your article on the four-day week reports the trial results fairly, but it is too quick to dismiss them as a novelty effect. The evidence deserves a fairer hearing, and so do the workers who took part.'
Why it works: it concedes what is true, which buys credibility; it names the article's real argument, which is engagement with the text; it takes a position; and the register is formal without being inflated. The salutation and sign-off are format markers a marker looks for in the first and last lines, and they cost four seconds.
3. What should Dara do about the half-remembered '40%' statistic, and about the tone answer?
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Drop the statistic. A misremembered or invented figure is the one error a reader cannot forgive, because it makes every other claim in the letter suspect. The article already supplies figures he can quote accurately, and if he cannot recall a number he can still make the claim without one: 'the trials reported measurable gains in output'. The letter's job is to argue with the article, not to out-research it.
Repair the tone answer. 'The tone is sarcastic' is an assertion, not an analysis, and the question explicitly demands reference to the text. Each claim needs a short quotation and a sentence on effect: name the tone ('wry', 'sceptical', 'mocking'), quote the words that create it, and say what the writer is doing to the reader - for example, 'the phrase "miracle cure" appears in quotation marks, which lets the writer signal doubt without stating it outright'. Two of those and the answer is safe; one without a quotation is a guess wearing a label.