The demonstration

Source: an original fiction extract.

“At eleven on Sunday, Tomas stood behind a table at the science fair with a homemade wind turbine. He had built it from scrap wood, a small motor and blades cut from a plastic bottle. A desk fan was meant to make it light a bulb. His younger sister had painted the sign: ENERGY FROM AIR. She had used three colours and left a green thumbprint beside the final letter. Tomas had placed a leaflet over the thumbprint before the judges arrived.

The fan rattled into life, pushing a thin stream of air across the table. The blades quivered, stumbled and began to turn. For a second the bulb held a thread of orange light. Then it went out. Around Tomas, other displays chirped, flashed and whirred with cheerful certainty. His turbine clicked on its crooked stand, a nervous little machine rehearsing a trick it could not remember.

He checked the wire, though he knew it was attached. The first judge asked what the problem might be. Tomas began the explanation he had memorised about renewable energy. The judge waited until he had finished. 'And this particular problem?' she asked. His sister crouched beside the table. 'The stand's moving,' she said. Tomas wished she would stand up. The second judge leaned down to look where she was pointing.

Tomas switched off the fan. In the quiet, he could hear someone laughing at the next stall. He took the leaflet from the sign, folded it and pushed it beneath the short leg of the stand. His sister held the base while he turned the fan on again. The bulb brightened. Not brilliantly; not enough to light the hall. But the orange thread stayed. The first judge asked him why the wedge had helped. This time, Tomas looked at the model while he answered.

He did not win a prize. On the way home, his sister carried the sign and he carried the turbine with both hands. At a crossing, she asked whether he would put the leaflet back over the thumbprint. Tomas looked at the green mark. 'No,' he said. 'It says who helped.' When the signal changed, she took one end of the stand, and they carried the awkward machine between them.”

Refer only to the second paragraph. Analyse how the writer uses language to present the failure of Tomas’s demonstration. Support your ideas with quotations from that paragraph. You could consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.