Selecting and Using Evidence for a Purpose: English – First Language 0500 (Cambridge O Level / IGCSE)

Read the passage, then answer the questions that follow.

On the flat roof of Whitmore House, a converted warehouse in the city centre, six wooden hives sit in two neat rows, screened from the wind by a low trellis of climbing beans. Priya Anand, who runs the building's residents' association, started the project eighteen months ago after noticing that the tomato plants in the shared roof garden were producing fewer fruit each summer. She reasoned that without enough pollinators nearby, flowers were simply not being fertilised. A local beekeeping charity donated two starter colonies and ran a single afternoon workshop for interested residents, and from there the project grew largely through trial and error.

The first winter nearly ended it. Priya had not realised how much a colony's stores could be depleted by a mild spell in December, when bees leave the hive to forage but find almost nothing in flower; one colony starved within a fortnight. She has since learned to check honey reserves by lifting the back of the hive rather than opening it, judging weight by feel, and to leave a fondant block wedged above the frames whenever the forecast turns unseasonably warm. The second winter, all six colonies survived.

Yields have crept up more slowly than residents hoped (the roof produced eleven jars of honey last year, sold at the autumn fair to cover the charity's ongoing support visits) but Priya insists the real measure of success is elsewhere. The courgette plants two floors below, on a terrace she cannot even see from the hives, fruited for the first time in three years, and she is certain the bees are responsible.

(a) Using details from the first paragraph, explain why Priya decided to introduce beehives to the roof. Support your answer with a short quotation. [3]

(b) Using your own words as far as possible, and one embedded quotation, explain what problem the beekeeping project faced in its first winter and how Priya solved it. [3]

Read the passage, then answer the question that follows.

Tomasz had kept the light at Blackrock Point for eleven years, and Friday would be his last watch before the automated system took over. He climbed the spiral stair for the final oil check out of habit rather than necessity, the new equipment ran on batteries topped up by a small turbine bolted to the gallery rail, and needed no oil at all. Still, he liked the smell of it, and he lingered by the lamp longer than the job required.

Down in the kitchen, he found the logbook open at a blank page, pen resting in the crease. For over a century, keepers had written a line each evening: wind direction, ships sighted, anything unusual. Tomorrow the entries would stop, replaced by a sensor feed nobody would read unless something went wrong. He picked up the pen, then set it down again without writing anything, unsure whether a final entry would mean something or nothing at all.

Outside, the tide was retreating fast, uncovering a stretch of black rock that gave the point its name. A trawler crew waved as they passed, as they always did, not knowing it was the last time anyone would wave back from that particular window.

Which quotation from the passage BEST supports the idea that Tomasz feels the human tradition of keeping the light is being lost, not simply replaced by newer machinery? [1]

Read the passage, then answer the questions that follow.

Mia's team had six minutes left on the clock when the robot's arm jammed for the third time. Regionals were being held in the sports hall of a school two hours from home, and the automated grading system would not pause for repairs once a match began. Her teammate Dembe crouched by the control box, running his finger along the connection where a wire had come loose during transport, while Mia scrolled through the code on her laptop, checking whether the gripping motor's calibration had reset itself, as it sometimes did after the device powered down overnight.

Their coach, Mr Osei, had warned them in the minibus that morning that nerves, not code, usually decided close matches, a comment Mia had found unhelpful at the time. The team had spent the previous month rewriting the pathfinding routine so the robot could navigate around the low barriers on the course without stalling, and that part, at least, was working perfectly in every test run; the arm fault was new, and nobody had seen it before.

Dembe found the loose wire and pressed the connector firmly back into its socket, and the diagnostic light on the control box turned from red to green. There was no time left to run a full test, so Mia simply reloaded the last saved calibration file and hoped it would hold. When their turn came, the robot crossed the course, lifted the block cleanly on the first attempt, and set it down inside the target zone with four seconds to spare. Afterwards, in the corridor, Dembe admitted he had been so focused on the wire that he had completely forgotten to check whether the battery pack was still fully charged.

Focus for this task: what went wrong just before Mia's team's match, and how the problem was fixed.

(a) Select and briefly explain, using evidence from the passage, TWO relevant details that answer this focus. [4]

(b) One student's answer to this focus also included the detail about Mr Osei's comment in the minibus that morning. Explain why this detail is NOT relevant evidence for this particular focus, even though it genuinely appears in the passage. [2]

(c) Using ONE short, precisely embedded quotation, write a single sentence that uses evidence from the passage to support the point that the fix was successful. [2]

Read the passage, then answer the questions that follow.

At four hundred metres, the last blue light from the surface finally gave out, and the submersible's cabin dimmed to nothing beyond the glow of the instrument panel. Naledi Vermaak had made forty-one dives in this same three-person sphere, and she still felt her pulse quicken at exactly this depth, the point past which sunlight simply could not reach no matter how clear the water above. The hull creaked once, a sound the manual described as "normal thermal contraction" but that never failed to make her hand tighten briefly on the control stick.

Her co-pilot, Dax, called out the pressure reading without being asked, a habit from an earlier expedition when a seal had failed at nine hundred metres and the crew had surfaced with eleven centimetres of water pooling under their seats. Nothing had failed today, but the memory kept both of them narrating numbers aloud long after it was strictly necessary.

Then the external lights swept across a ridge nobody on the mission had charted, and a field of tube worms taller than either pilot came into view, swaying in a current too faint to feel through the hull. Dax stopped calling out numbers. Neither of them spoke for almost a full minute, watching pale crabs pick their way between structures that had likely stood undisturbed for centuries, lit for the first time by anything other than the faint chemical glow the worms produced themselves. Naledi reached for the camera controls only when she remembered, with a slight shock, that this was still meant to be a working dive and not simply something to watch.

This part of the account contains details that show the dive felt dangerous, and details that show the same dive also became a moment of wonder.

(a) Select and quote TWO details that provide evidence the dive felt dangerous. For each, briefly explain what it shows. [4]

(b) Select and quote TWO details that provide evidence the moment at the ridge felt like a moment of wonder. For each, briefly explain what it shows. [3]

Read the passage, then answer the questions that follow.

Deniz had run the same corner stall for six years, selling grilled corn and spiced flatbreads to commuters outside the station, but the invitation to the city's autumn food festival was the first time anyone from outside the neighbourhood had noticed his stand. The festival organisers charged a flat fee for the pitch, non-refundable regardless of how many customers turned up, and Deniz had already spent most of his savings on a larger griddle so he could serve faster during the expected rush.

Two days before the festival, the forecast changed from mild sunshine to steady rain for the whole weekend, and Deniz knew from years at the station that rain kept commuters moving quickly past his stall rather than stopping to queue. He also learned, from a message in the vendors' group chat, that four other stalls at the festival would be selling very similar grilled flatbreads, undercutting his prices by nearly a third. His daughter Elif offered to help him print new signs highlighting the stall's slow-cooked spice mix, something none of the other vendors used, but the printer at the library was broken until Monday, one day after the festival ended.

On the morning of the festival itself, the rain held off until midday, and by then Deniz had already sold out of flatbreads twice.

Focus for this task: the reasons Deniz feared his stall might fail at the festival, before it began.

From the list below, the four statements are: Statement 1: Deniz had run the same stall for six years. Statement 2: The weather forecast changed to steady rain for the festival weekend. Statement 3: Four other stalls would be selling similar food more cheaply. Statement 4: The rain held off until midday on the day of the festival itself.

(a) Identify the TWO statements that are RELEVANT evidence for this focus, and for each, give the supporting quotation from the passage. [4]

(b) Explain briefly why Statement 1 and Statement 4, although both true, are NOT relevant evidence for this particular focus. [2]

Read the passage, then answer the questions that follow.

Coach Idris always told Renata the same thing before a marathon: treat the first ten kilometres as a warm conversation, not an argument, and never push the pace early no matter how good you feel. At the fifteen-kilometre mark of the coastal marathon, her watch buzzed to show she was nineteen seconds ahead of her planned split. She let herself hold that gap rather than easing back onto the pace band taped to her wrist, telling herself a small cushion could only help later.

By kilometre eighteen the gap had grown to almost a minute, and she still felt strong on the flat road along the harbour, so she reasoned that slowing down now would simply waste an advantage she had worked hard to build. She pushed on at the faster pace through the incline that followed rather than reining herself in.

The long hill at kilometre twenty changed everything. Her legs began to feel hollow, drained of the reserve she would need for the final six kilometres, and within half a mile her stride had shortened to something closer to a shuffle. Two runners she had comfortably overtaken earlier passed her back without appearing to work hard at all. By the finish, she would later tell Coach Idris, there had simply been nothing left in her legs for the last, hardest stretch of the course, and the final six kilometres had taken almost as long as the first eighteen.

Focus for this task: why Renata slowed so dramatically over the final six kilometres of the race.

(a) The passage contains two sentences that both provide evidence for this focus by describing Renata's legs running out of energy. Quote the ONE phrase you judge to be the clearer, more precise piece of evidence, and briefly explain why using both phrases together would be unnecessary. [2]

(b) Using mostly your own words, plus your chosen quotation embedded within a single sentence, explain why Renata slowed so dramatically in the final six kilometres. [3]

Read the passage, then answer the question that follows.

While cataloguing a box of unsorted correspondence donated to the town archive, Mr Okafor found a letter dated 1889 from the foreman of the old rope-works, addressed to the parish council. Local memory had always assumed the clock tower on the square was built simply to mark the town's incorporation as a borough that same year, a fact repeated on the small brass plaque at its base. The foreman's letter told a different story.

Six months earlier, the letter explained, two workers leaving a night shift had climbed onto a moving conveyor belt in near-darkness, misjudging the time because their pocket watches had drifted out of agreement with one another by almost twenty minutes. One worker was seriously injured. The foreman wrote that every workshop in the town kept its own approximate time, and that a single, unmistakably visible clock, audible and lit at night, would let every shift change safely at the same true moment, rather than relying on watches that no two men in the yard ever quite agreed on.

The council minutes from the following spring, which Mr Okafor located afterwards, approved funds for a public clock of sufficient size to be read from the rope-works yard, months before the incorporation was even confirmed. The elegant ironwork and the Latin inscription came later, added by the borough's first mayor, who was fond of grand civic gestures.

Which sentence BEST summarises, using only relevant evidence from the letter and the council minutes, why the town decided to build the clock tower? [1]

Read the passage, then answer the questions that follow.

The Ferngate Repair Café opened in the community hall three years ago, run entirely by volunteers who mend broken household items free of charge on the first Saturday of every month. Visitors bring in anything from toasters and table lamps to torn coats and wobbly chairs, and a rotating team of retired engineers, textile teachers and hobbyist tinkerers works through the queue with whatever tools and spare parts they have on hand.

Marina Costas, who has volunteered since the café's very first session, says the appeal goes beyond simply saving money. "People often arrive expecting a quick fix and leave having learned how their appliance actually works, which changes how carefully they look after it afterwards," she explained during last month's session. Records kept by the organisers show that of the two hundred and thirty items brought in over the past year, just under eighty percent left in working order, and organisers estimate this kept roughly one and a half tonnes of material out of the nearest landfill site.

Not every repair succeeds. Some newer volunteers admit they sometimes lack the specialist parts an older item needs, and a handful of visitors have been told, apologetically, that a device is beyond saving. Even so, the hall's booking has had to be extended by an extra hour this year to cope with growing queues, and the organisers are now exploring whether a second monthly session could be added from the autumn.

A local hardware shop has also begun donating surplus screws, fuses and small tools each month, though the shop's owner insists this is simply good publicity rather than any special commitment to the café's aims.

Focus for this task: why the volunteers believe the repair café is worth continuing, beyond simply saving people money.

Two students each drafted a sentence using evidence from Marina Costas's comment to answer this focus:

Draft 1: Marina Costas, a volunteer since the café began, argues that its value goes beyond cost savings, since visitors typically "leave having learned how their appliance actually works, which changes how carefully they look after it afterwards."

Draft 2: Marina Costas says the appeal goes beyond simply saving money, because people often arrive expecting a quick fix and leave having learned how their appliance actually works, which changes how carefully they look after it afterwards.

(a) Identify which draft integrates the evidence correctly, and explain how you can tell. [3]

(b) Explain what is wrong with the other draft's use of evidence, even though its content is accurate and relevant. [2]

(c) Rewrite the incorrect draft as a single, fluent sentence that properly quotes and clearly references the same evidence. [4]

Read the passage, then answer the question that follows.

By the fourth week at the rehabilitation centre, the young fox in enclosure three could walk without any visible limp, and volunteers had started calling her 'the quick one' because she reached her food bowl before the door had even finished sliding open. Callum, the senior vet technician, examined her hind leg carefully under low light each morning, running a thumb slowly along the healed fracture line to check for any give in the bone.

He noted in the centre's log that the X-ray from ten days earlier showed the bone had knitted cleanly, with none of the irregular calcification that sometimes signals a fracture healing under strain. Even so, he wrote that he was not yet willing to recommend her for release, since a fox that had spent four weeks recovering on a soft, flat enclosure floor had not been tested on the kind of broken, uneven ground she would need to sprint across within days of returning to the wild. Two other technicians, keen to free up the enclosure for a barn owl due to arrive that Friday, thought she looked ready to go.

Which of the following is the CORRECTLY selected piece of evidence (a short, exact quotation from the passage) that best supports the point that Callum doubted the fox was ready for release, despite her healthy appearance? [1]

Read the passage, then answer the questions that follow.

When the regional paper asked Mrs Whitcombe for a comment on the new multiplex opening two miles from her seafront cinema, The Tide, she told the reporter, "This cinema has survived worse than a multiplex, and it will survive this too," a line the paper printed beneath a photograph of her smiling in the ticket booth.

Behind that smile, the accounts told a different story. Ticket sales for the two months since the multiplex announcement were down by almost a third compared with the same period the previous year, and Mrs Whitcombe had already quietly asked her projectionist, who had worked at The Tide for over a decade, whether he would consider part-time hours from the spring, rather than his usual full week. She had also stopped restocking the sweet counter with anything beyond the three best-selling lines, reasoning that ordering a full range for customers who might not come back would only leave her with stock she could not sell.

Her daughter Elif, who helped with the books on Sunday evenings, found her one night re-reading the same three-year lease renewal letter for perhaps the fifth time, though she had already signed nothing and told nobody she was hesitating.

To the reporter, and to her regular customers at the counter, Mrs Whitcombe kept insisting that nothing had really changed.

Focus for this task: evidence that, despite her public confidence, Mrs Whitcombe privately doubted whether the cinema could survive.

(a) Select and quote TWO details that provide evidence of this private doubt. For each, briefly explain what it shows. [4]

(b) One detail in the passage is Mrs Whitcombe's public quotation to the newspaper: "This cinema has survived worse than a multiplex, and it will survive this too." Explain why this detail is NOT usable as evidence for the focus above, even though it is directly about the cinema's survival. [2]