Source A: A fair weight

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

The festival programme described the pumpkin weighing as a family attraction. I imagined children, a table and vegetables slightly larger than the ones in a shop. In the square, four men were moving a pumpkin on a padded board while its owner walked beside it with the expression of somebody accompanying a difficult relative to an appointment.

I stood near the scale because there was shade. This was interpreted as an application for office. A woman gave me a clipboard and asked whether I could read the display when each pumpkin settled. I said yes before learning that the numbers would be announced through a microphone. The woman explained that a visitor made a neutral official. Neutrality, apparently, was the qualification available when expertise was absent.

The first pumpkin arrived without incident. I read the number, somebody wrote it on a board and the audience applauded. I began enjoying the dignity of an important job which seemed to consist entirely of recognising digits. Then the largest pumpkin was lowered onto the platform. Its grower told everyone to stand back. The display trembled between two figures. I chose the larger one and announced it.

A man in a brown hat raised his hand. He asked whether I had allowed the platform to settle. I looked at the display, which had chosen the smaller figure without consulting me. The grower said the first reading was clearly correct because everyone had heard it. The man in the hat said sound did not make weight. I found this logically persuasive and socially unhelpful.

The woman with the clipboard’s matching pen returned. She asked me to read the settled figure, then explained the result herself. The grower complained, though not for long. His pumpkin still won. I had nearly made the event more controversial without changing its outcome, a form of contribution which seemed unlikely to be mentioned in the programme.

Afterwards, the man in the hat showed me how the platform moved. His own pumpkin had come third. He talked about rain, soil and a split skin with a seriousness I had not expected to find beside a competition I had considered faintly ridiculous. I began to understand that the vegetables had occupied months which I had encountered only for an afternoon.

When the woman asked whether I would return next year, I said I would be happy to watch. She laughed and took back the clipboard. I bought a slice of pumpkin cake from a stall and ate it away from the scale, where nobody could mistake my position for another offer of professional assistance.

Source B: From A Game of Polo with a Headless Goat — Emma Levine

Read Source B in the official Pearson anthology (printed pages 14–15).

Compare how the writers present their ideas and perspectives about how an unfamiliar public event can become both entertaining and uncomfortable.

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