Source A: The average street

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

The dashboard said our district was doing well. A single number, printed in green, showed the average size of a home. The number had risen since the previous survey. At the meeting, somebody called it good news for families. I had helped prepare the dashboard, and I wanted to be pleased.

Then a housing officer asked which families. I opened the table behind the chart. A group of large new houses had entered the survey that year. Many smaller flats remained exactly as they had been, with the same number of people sharing them. The average had risen, but the person living inside the average did not exist.

This was not a calculation error. That was the uncomfortable part. Every addition and division could be checked. The mistake occurred when a modest mathematical statement put on a larger coat and introduced itself as an account of everybody's life. We had changed the colour of the number to green before asking what anyone was entitled to feel about it.

Averages are useful. Without summaries, a public report could become a warehouse of figures in which only a specialist knew where to find the door. But a summary is a choice about what to bring forward and what to place behind it. The choice is not made innocent by being expressed in digits rather than adjectives.

We rebuilt the page. The average remained, smaller this time. Beside it were groups showing different kinds of home, a note about who had answered the survey, and a question asking readers whether their circumstances appeared in the picture. The page looked less triumphant. It was also more difficult to turn into a reassuring headline.

At the next meeting, discussion took longer. People disagreed about which comparison mattered. One colleague worried that we had made a simple message confusing. Perhaps we had. Yet the earlier simplicity had not removed disagreement; it had hidden the people whose experience would produce it.

I still make charts for a living. I do not believe that every report should apologise for existing. I do believe that a clean line and a confident colour can lend authority to a statement whose limits have not been read. Now, before approving a dashboard, I ask where I would find the person who does not fit its most memorable number. If the answer is nowhere, the page is not finished.

Source B: From The Danger of a Single Story — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Read Source B in the official Pearson anthology (printed pages 2–3).

Compare how the writers present their ideas and perspectives about the dangers of accepting a limited account as the whole truth.

Support your answer with detailed examples from both texts, including brief quotations.