Source A: The height of the appeal

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

The sketch showed a person suspended between two rooftops, with our charity’s name beneath their feet. It was a good picture. Even before anyone had checked the buildings, somebody had made it the opening slide of the fundraising plan. The proposed crossing would be called a leap for the future, though the person making it was supposed to walk along a cable. The language had become airborne before the arrangements had left the table.

I helped organise the charity’s appeals. We needed money for a quiet, unphotogenic purpose: keeping a telephone advice service open on weekday evenings. The crossing promised publicity which ordinary accounts of our work rarely obtained. A supporter offered to attempt it, and a local company offered a large donation if the event went ahead. Everyone wanted the service to survive. That shared purpose made it strangely difficult to ask whether this particular idea deserved to survive with it.

At the planning meeting, I asked about wind, access to the roofs and what would happen if the participant had to stop halfway. These were questions, not predictions of disaster. Yet each sounded, in the room, like a withdrawal of enthusiasm. Someone said a professional would deal with the technical details. We had not appointed that professional. Someone else said the participant was extremely confident. I wrote confidence in my notebook, then left a large space beside it.

The estimates arrived the following week. Proper assessment, equipment and event support would cost far more than the first sketch suggested. The company’s donation remained generous, but the calculation now had several extra lines. We could not count the promised income without counting the price of making the event responsible. Nor could we treat the possibility of assistance as though it were a private arrangement between the participant and the sky.

We abandoned the rooftop crossing. It was an awkward decision to announce after the sketch had travelled so widely. A few people said we had lost our nerve. Perhaps we had lost something more useful: the belief that a striking image could do the thinking for us. The supporter later helped run a much smaller appeal, which paid for several months of evening calls. Its photographs showed people sitting at tables. Nobody mistook them for a feat.

I still want our work to be noticed. I no longer assume that the most dramatic way of attracting attention is the best use of the attention we receive. The advice line needed a future. It did not need a person hanging above a street to prove that the future mattered.

Source B: Explorers or boys messing about? Either way, taxpayer gets rescue bill — Steven Morris

Read Source B in the official Pearson anthology (printed pages 8–9).

Compare how the writers present their ideas and perspectives about the relationship between public attention and dangerous ambition.

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