Booking the village minibus
Text 1: Why we ask for Thursday, by Siobhan Carvell
An original contemporary blog.
Our community minibus has twelve seats, a wheelchair lift and a rota of nine volunteer drivers, most of them retired. It runs to the market town every Tuesday and Friday, the only link many villagers have since the 41 bus was withdrawn. Passengers must book by noon on Thursday for the following week, and some grumble about this. The deadline has good reasons behind it. Our coordinator, Pat, needs time to plan a route that collects everyone from their own front door without anyone sitting on board for over an hour. She also has to find a driver trained on the lift whenever a wheelchair user is travelling, and only three of our nine have done that course. Late bookings are squeezed in when a seat is free.
Explain two reasons why passengers must book the minibus by noon on Thursday.
160 exam-style questions on OCR GCSE English Language 2.3 Section A: Reading information and ideas – skills, covering 2.3.1 Identify and interpret key ideas, 2.3.2 Comment on writers’ language choices, 2.3.4 Summarise and synthesise across texts, 2.3.7 Evaluate usefulness, bias and misuse of evidence, 2.3.8 Use context to inform reading, and 2.3.9 Explore connections across texts. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.