Source A: The missing minutes

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

Our report said that drinking water had reached all six emergency centres by 18:40. I entered the final delivery number, checked it against the driver’s sheet and watched the completion column turn blue. For the first time that afternoon, every box contained something. I printed the page for the morning briefing. It looked like an orderly day.

At the smallest centre, where a chemical leak had made the tap water unsafe, a resident asked to see the delivery times. I expected him to dispute the number of bottles. Instead, he put a finger beside 18:40 and asked where the waiting went. The report had a departure time, an arrival time and a quantity. It had no place for the hours between the announcement that supplies were coming and the sound of the van outside.

He told me that his mother had taken her evening tablets late because she did not want to use their last half-bottle. Someone had walked to a shop which was already closed. A volunteer had repeated the same reassurance until people stopped asking her anything. None of these things contradicted the driver’s sheet. The van had arrived at 18:40. My accurate page could accommodate the delivery and still omit most of what the day had meant.

I asked whether I could write down his account. He said yes, then stopped me when I described the residents as patient. Some had been patient, he said; others had shouted, and some had gone upstairs because they were exhausted. He did not want them turned into a lesson about community spirit. He wanted the next delivery estimate to distinguish between a hope and a confirmed time. I crossed out the adjective. Without it, the sentence was less graceful and more useful.

Back at the office, I added a separate section recording the period without reliable information, and marked which details came from residents rather than the delivery log. I kept the arrival time. Numbers had not become dishonest merely because they were incomplete. But the blue box no longer looked like the end of the story. The following morning, someone asked whether my extra section could be shortened for the summary slide. I shortened it, then placed the waiting time beside the delivery time, where it could not quietly disappear into an appendix. The report would travel further than my conversation. That made the space I gave it a responsibility, rather than a matter of layout.

Source B: From A Passage to Africa — George Alagiah

Read Source B in the official Pearson anthology (printed pages 4–5).

Compare how the writers present their ideas and perspectives about the limitations of recording other people’s hardship.

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