Evaluating Viewpoint, Argument and Bias: Question 8
Syllabus R3, R4
Read Text A and Text B, two extracts on the same question, should zoos still exist? then answer the questions that follow.
Text A
Watching a tiger pace the same forty metres of enclosure, day after day, for its entire life, should trouble anyone who claims to care about animals. Zoos dress themselves up as "conservation," but let us be honest about what most visitors actually come for: entertainment, a photo, an ice cream, a way to kill a wet Saturday afternoon. The animals are simply the backdrop. If we genuinely valued these species, we would invest in protecting their actual habitats instead of building elaborate cages and calling it education. A generation raised on watching a lion behind glass learns nothing true about lions at all, only that wild creatures exist for us to look at.
Text B
My daughter has never seen a red panda in the wild, and thanks to habitat loss, she may never get the chance to. Last month, at our local zoo, she watched one for twenty minutes, asked three keepers detailed questions, and has talked about becoming a conservationist ever since. Modern zoos are not the cramped cages of decades past; accredited zoos fund breeding programmes that have brought species back from the brink of extinction, including the Arabian oryx, once extinct in the wild and now roaming free again thanks to zoo-bred populations. Dismissing every zoo as mere entertainment ignores this: for millions of children who will never afford a safari, a zoo may be the only encounter with a living wild animal that ever inspires them to protect one.
(a) Identify one persuasive technique used in Text A and one used in Text B, and explain the effect of each. [4] (b) Which text do you find more balanced and fair in how it treats the opposing point of view? Support your answer with evidence from both texts. [3] (c) Each text makes a claim that could, in principle, be checked against evidence. Identify one such claim from each text, and explain how confident you would be in relying on it, given what is or is not shown to support it. [3]
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Assessment focus
At this level, evaluation means working across two texts: comparing the specific techniques each writer relies on, judging which text treats the opposing side more fairly, and assessing how much confidence a checkable-sounding claim actually deserves in each case, not simply deciding which text “sounds more convincing.”
Part (a): Persuasive techniques in each text
Text A relies on a false dichotomy, implying that caring about zoo animals and funding habitat conservation are mutually exclusive choices, which makes zoos sound like a wasteful alternative to “real” conservation rather than a possible complement to it. It also generalises about visitor motives without evidence. Text B, by contrast, opens with a personal anecdote, a single child’s experience, and quietly extends it into a claim about zoos’ educational value generally, and uses one named example (the Arabian oryx) to stand in for the achievements of “accredited zoos” as a category, without establishing how typical that example is.
Part (b): Which text is more balanced?
Text B shows at least a trace of balance by conceding that zoos were not always run well (“not the cramped cages of decades past”), which implicitly accepts that some historical criticism of zoos was fair. Text A offers no equivalent concession: it does not mention conservation breeding, animal welfare improvements, or any other counter-evidence, and directly dismisses the conservation argument as a kind of disguise rather than engaging with it. This makes Text A the more one-sided of the two, even though both texts clearly argue for a particular conclusion.
Part (c): Reliability of checkable claims
Both texts state claims with confidence that sound as though they could be checked, but neither text actually cites a source. Text B’s Arabian oryx claim is more specific and independently well known as a genuine conservation case, which arguably makes it easier to place some trust in even without a cited source; Text A’s claim about visitor motives is vaguer and more obviously an assumption dressed up as an observed fact. Strong answers avoid simply trusting the more specific-sounding claim and instead explain, in each case, what would be needed to actually verify it.
Common pitfalls specific to these texts
- Candidates sometimes treat Text B as automatically “more reliable” purely because it uses a specific example, without noting that no source is given for the Arabian oryx claim either.
- Some candidates confuse “which text I agree with” for part (b) with “which text is more balanced”. A text can argue strongly for a position while still being the fairer of the two in how it treats the opposing view.