The Statistic That Answers the Wrong Question
Mira is sitting a Year 11 mock for Paper 1, Section A. The passage is a 480-word opinion column arguing that a pedestrianisation trial in a town square should be made permanent. It cites a council consultation of 312 respondents, of whom 61% supported the scheme, and calls this 'a clear majority'. It then concedes that eleven retailers have complained about delivery access before turning to a 2019 traffic count showing a 40% fall in vehicles in the square. Mira has 25 minutes for four questions and has underlined almost every number in the passage. Her answer to the three-mark question 'What does the writer mean by "a clear majority", and why does he use the phrase?' reads in full: 'Most people want it.' She writes nothing about the retailers' paragraph, and she spends four minutes on the one-mark vocabulary question about the word 'trialled'.
1. Explain why Mira's answer earns only one of the three marks, then write the answer she should have produced.
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Why it caps at 1/3
- Figure and scope: she never states 61% of 312 respondents, the only place the number belongs. 'Most people' has no source attached.
- Inference: she silently converts respondents into people - the whole town - which is exactly the leap the writer wants the reader to make. A top-band answer names that leap instead of performing it.
- Purpose: the second half of the question ('why does he use the phrase?') is unanswered. There is no comment on what the wording does to a reader.
Full-mark answer 'By "a clear majority" the writer means that 61% of the 312 people who responded to the council consultation supported the scheme. The phrase does two jobs. It turns a raw percentage into a collective voice - "a clear majority" sounds like the settled view of the town rather than the view of those who happened to reply - and it lets the writer avoid mentioning that 312 is a small, self-selected sample. The wording therefore borrows the authority of a democratic mandate for evidence that only shows the opinions of people motivated enough to respond, nudging readers to accept the scheme as already endorsed.'
The method to teach: quote the phrase, decode the number, name the gap between sample and population, then state the persuasive effect. Four moves, three marks.
2. The retailers' paragraph carries no marks in Mira's script because she wrote nothing. Explain what the paragraph is doing, and what an answer needs to say about it.
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Structure: it is a concession followed by a rebuttal. The writer grants a genuine objection - eleven retailers, delivery access - at the point where a sceptical reader is most likely to stop reading, then pivots to the 2019 traffic count.
Three effects worth credit
- Credibility: a writer who admits a cost reads as fair, so the later claim is trusted more.
- Inoculation: the objection is raised and answered in the writer's own terms before a reader can raise it, and it is framed to look small - 'eleven retailers' is countable and specific, not 'local businesses fear'.
- Proportion: the paragraph is short relative to the evidence that follows, quietly signalling that the objection is minor.
The arguable joint: the pivot assumes a 40% fall in vehicles outweighs lost trade. That assumption is never defended, and the strongest answers name it. Mira read the paragraph as being 'about shops' and so had nothing to analyse. A two-column note - objection | how it is framed - would have given her a sentence to write.
3. Mira has 25 minutes and four questions. Give her a triage routine for the first five minutes of reading that would prevent this pattern of loss.
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Annotate claims, not numbers. Numbers are evidence; underlining them alone leaves a list of facts with no argument attached. For each paragraph she should mark three things:
- the claim - the noun phrase the writer wants her to accept ('a clear majority', 'a safer square');
- the evidence offered for it, with its source and size;
- any booster or hedge doing persuasive work ('clear', 'proven', 'some would argue').
Flag the seams. Paragraphs beginning with a concession marker do the structural work in this genre. If she circles them, she will always have something to say about function.
Time budget: 5 minutes reading and annotating, 17 minutes writing, 3 minutes checking that every answer quotes the passage. The vocabulary question is worth 1 mark: one minute, one sentence, move on. The mistake was not misreading the passage - it was spending her cheapest mark's time on her most expensive question. Triage rule: minutes spent should roughly track marks available, plus one minute per answer for finding a quotation.