Source A: The mountains through the headphones

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

From the bus window, the mountains looked silent. Their pale faces rose above the town in layers, and the highest ridge seemed too far from ordinary life to contain a sound. I had come to make a short radio feature about the landscape. In my notes, I had written an opening built around quietness. The view appeared to approve it.

At the guesthouse, I put on the headphones and switched on the recorder. The room changed. A pipe clicked behind the wall. Someone dragged a chair across a floor below. Beyond the window, a delivery van reversed with three electronic notes which belonged, in my imagination, to a supermarket car park. I lowered the headphones and looked at the mountain again. It remained enormous and apparently soundless. The machine was refusing to record the place I could see.

The next morning, I walked to a terrace above the houses. I expected a clearer recording there. Instead, the town reached me in separate layers: a hammer, a dog, a burst of music, a motor climbing slowly through a bend. A woman shaking a rug from a balcony paused to ask what I was doing. I explained that I was looking for the sound of the mountains. She listened for a moment, then pointed towards the road and said that the bread delivery was late.

I felt briefly disappointed. I had wanted a sentence which would help the audience imagine distance from everyday demands. She had given me breakfast. Yet the road was part of the slope I was recording, and the delivery had to climb it. The hammer belonged to a roof beneath the ridge. The balcony stood where people had found a way to live in the view. I had been asking the settlement to stop sounding like a settlement so that the landscape could perform its grandeur more clearly.

That afternoon, I recorded from the same terrace without trying to find an interval between all the other noises. The mountains did not supply a single identifiable voice. They shaped where the road went, how the houses stood and how long the van’s engine remained audible. Listening made their scale feel different from looking. It brought the effort of inhabiting them into the frame.

The feature still began with the view from the bus. Then I let the reversing notes interrupt the description. They were less elegant than the silence I had planned. They were also part of the morning I had actually encountered. Before leaving, I bought bread from the driver when he finally stopped below the guesthouse. I kept that small exchange in the recording too.

Source B: From Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan — Jamie Zeppa

Read Source B in the official Pearson anthology (printed pages 16–18).

Compare how the writers present their ideas and perspectives about first impressions of an unfamiliar landscape and its people.

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