Source A: Breakfast at the long table

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

The hotel served breakfast at one long table. I arrived early and chose a chair near the window, partly for the light and partly because it left fewer directions from which conversation might approach. A large plate of pastries stood in front of me. Beside it were six small plates stacked so neatly that I assumed they belonged to a system which would become clear if I waited.

Other guests arrived in pairs. They greeted the woman bringing coffee, then each other. I greeted everyone with the same useful smile, a facial expression which said both good morning and please do not ask me anything complicated before tea. A man pointed towards the pastries and said something. I understood a word which I thought meant yours. I nodded. He looked surprised and took a piece of bread instead.

I moved the pastry plate closer, believing I had accepted an offer. For several minutes, nobody touched it. This confirmed my interpretation so thoroughly that I began to feel embarrassed by the hotel’s generosity. I selected one pastry, then another, wondering how much refusal was required before a host understood that one person could not eat an architectural arrangement of dough.

The woman returned with the coffee pot. She looked at the plate, looked at the empty space in the middle of the table and moved it back without comment. The man reached for a pastry. So did the woman beside him. I discovered, with the heat of a revelation entirely disproportionate to its importance, that I had been guarding the shared breakfast.

I apologised. The man explained slowly, using a few words in my language, that he had asked whether the plate was mine to pass. The little word I had recognised was real; the meaning I had built around it was not. He handed me the empty small plate I had failed to take from the stack. Its purpose was much less mysterious now that I needed somewhere to put my second pastry.

After that, I asked more questions and made fewer nods. The conversation concerned a delayed train, someone’s sore foot and whether the rain would stop. Nothing required a grand account of local customs. We were people eating breakfast, with one person temporarily operating on inadequate evidence.

Later, I wrote a note about the hotel. I described the coffee, the window and the long table. I did not write that guests were unusually generous or fiercely protective of pastries. Those observations would have made a lively sentence. They would also have described, with considerable confidence, a country which had existed mainly inside my misunderstanding.

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 the awkwardness of trying to understand an unfamiliar social situation.

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