Source A: The field that holds the rain
The first time I walked beside the Mere, I thought the village had been given a view. Reeds shivered in the wind; water caught the pale sky; a heron lifted itself from the far bank with the slow authority of a curtain rising. I had come to write about the new wetland, and I began, as visitors often do, with what could be seen.
At the village hall, the map on the wall showed the stream running straight between two dark lines. For years, people had called that arrangement tidy. The banks were cut back, the channel cleared, and the water hurried towards the road. When heavy rain came, it reached the lowest houses before anyone had time to move the sandbags. A woman called Jean pointed to a pencil mark on her kitchen door. “That was the water in the dining room,” she said. She did not raise her voice. The mark did it for her.
The work began with a decision that looked, from the path, like making a mess. The straight channel was opened out into shallow bends. Some fields were allowed to flood in winter. Reeds and grasses returned, and the water slowed where it had once been pushed on. The new pools were not built as ornaments. They were places for rain to spread and settle before it met the houses.
I kept looking for a single dramatic moment when the village had been saved. There was none. Instead, Jean showed me the door after a storm: no fresh line, no wet carpet, no row of furniture lifted onto bricks. “You notice it most when nothing happens,” she said. Her sentence made the empty room seem less empty. It held the work that had been done upstream.
From the road, the change can still look like neglect. There are no clipped edges, and in summer the grass hides the water. Yet the people who live here do not describe the place as a picture. They talk about the stream having somewhere to go, and about being able to sleep when rain drums on the roof. I had arrived expecting to write about a view. I left understanding that, for this village, the wetland is measured in what does not enter the house.
How does the writer use language and structure to develop an outsider’s understanding of the wetland’s purpose, and how effectively does the ending change the view established at the beginning? Support your answer with detailed examples from the text, including brief quotations.
220 exam-style questions on Edexcel A IGCSE English Language 1.1 Content overview, covering 1.1.1 Anthology non-fiction texts, 1.1.2 Analysing linguistic and structural devices, 1.1.3 Links and connections between writers' ideas, 1.1.4 Transactional writing for purpose and audience, and 1.1.5 Accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.