Source A: The village in the brochure

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

The brochure called it a fishing village. I had written the sentence myself, beside a photograph of blue boats, a low harbour wall and three gulls whose positions were almost too convenient. It was a good sentence for the available space. It was also the sentence the village had been carrying for about forty years.

When I returned to check the copy, I stayed above a bakery. My host's daughter worked from a desk in the room next door, testing software for a company whose office was somewhere I had never been. At lunch, she asked what I was writing. I showed her the page.

“Do the rest of us go invisible at the harbour?” she asked.

I laughed because I thought she was joking. She asked me to walk to the end of the street. We passed the boats, which were real and important. Then we passed a care home, a workshop making components for laboratory equipment and a room where three people were editing subtitles. Half the people we met travelled out to work. Others worked at home, cared for relatives or were looking for a job.

None of this made a neat rival label. Technology village would have been as absurd as pretending the care home employed everyone. The difficulty was not that fishing had disappeared. It was that the photograph encouraged a visitor to believe the whole place was waiting inside it.

For a moment I resented the complications. Visitors wanted an invitation, not a labour-market survey. But an invitation can open a door or draw a curtain. I had offered a picturesque curtain, then called it a view.

We changed the page. The boats stayed. So did the harbour walk and the little museum. Alongside them, a paragraph described a working place whose residents did more than preserve a visitor's preferred version of the past. We added a local interview without asking its speaker to sound charming. The design took longer, and the headline became less elegant.

On my last morning, I bought bread before the bus. The bakery was full of people discussing a delayed parcel, a school application and a leaking roof. Nobody was performing village life for me. I could have taken another lovely photograph through the window. Instead, I checked that the new page did not promise readers they already knew everyone they would meet. A brochure cannot introduce every life. It can at least leave the door open for one it has not described.

Source B: From The Danger of a Single Story — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Read Source B in the official Pearson anthology (printed pages 2–3).

Compare how the writers present their ideas and perspectives about how repeated descriptions shape ideas about a place.

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