The winning number

Text C: an original fiction extract.

The youth centre's fundraising afternoon was nearly over when Suri carried the raffle drum onto the stage. She had organised the tickets with two other volunteers. One table stood by the entrance and another beside the refreshments, so visitors would not need to queue in the same place. Both tables had used blue tickets, which Suri thought made the arrangement look coordinated. The money had been counted and recorded separately, then placed together in the office. The main prize, a bicycle donated by a local shop, stood beside the stage with a ribbon round its handlebars.

The centre manager drew a ticket and read out its number. A woman near the entrance raised her hand. At the refreshments table, a teenage boy did the same. Both held a blue ticket bearing the announced number. Suri first assumed that one of them had misheard. When she brought the tickets together, the figures matched exactly. The boy said his younger sister had chosen the ticket from the roll beside the cakes. The woman had bought hers on arriving. Neither had done anything which made one claim less legitimate than the other.

Behind the stage, Suri examined the remaining rolls. They had come from two boxes in the cupboard and started with the same sequence of numbers. The volunteers had put one matching half of every sold ticket into a bowl at each table, then emptied both bowls into the drum. A repeated number might therefore identify two different buyers. The separate money totals showed how much each table had raised, but did not connect each sold ticket to a particular roll. Counting the money again could not supply information that nobody had recorded.

One volunteer suggested giving the prize to the person who had called first. Suri pointed out that one table was much further from the stage, and she could not establish whose hand had risen first anyway. Another suggested drawing again immediately. The boy asked whether the same thing could happen to a second number. Suri looked towards the people waiting to leave. She wanted a decision which would allow the afternoon to end. That did not make the available decisions equally fair.

The manager paused the draw and explained the problem over the microphone. The two claimants agreed to wait while she consulted the donating shop. Suri checked the drum and the tickets with another volunteer rather than remove the inconvenient pair and continue. The shop offered a second bicycle of the same model. Both claimants accepted that solution, and the manager explained publicly what had happened. There were still smaller prizes to draw, so the remaining draw was postponed until the organisers could establish a clear procedure and tell ticket holders how it would work.

Afterwards, the photograph for the centre's page showed two bicycles. Suri asked that the caption explain the duplicate numbers and the shop's additional donation. The picture alone might suggest that everything had gone to plan. She kept samples from both rolls beside the afternoon's accounts. For the next event, she proposed checking ticket identification across all sales points before opening, recording the batches used and agreeing a way to pause and communicate if a disputed claim arose. Two convenient tables had not been the problem. Treating matching colours as evidence of a working system had been.

You are Suri. Write a report for the youth centre committee explaining the raffle problem, evaluating the response and recommending arrangements for future events.

In your response:

• explain how the problem arose and what the records could and could not establish
• evaluate the possible responses and how the disputed claim was handled
• recommend practical arrangements for future events and truthful reporting of this one

Base your response on Text C, developing its ideas in your own words. Write about 250 to 300 words. Up to 10 marks are available for reading and up to 10 marks for writing.