Source A: The street behind the label

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

The archive drawer had been opened so often that its brass handle was smooth. Inside lay a council survey of six streets and a row of workshops. Beside the heading ‘Area 6’, someone had typed: ‘obsolete housing.’

I was helping to prepare an exhibition about the town before its redevelopment. My job was to select records, shorten captions and arrange extracts in an order visitors could follow. The council report supplied a ready-made story. It described leaking roofs, overcrowded rooms and buildings scheduled for demolition. I chose passages that seemed to confirm it: a list of repairs left undone, a note about a boarded window, a register entry describing a property as empty.

During the preview, an elderly woman stood beside the display for several minutes. She wore a green coat and held the exhibition leaflet folded into a precise square. Eventually, she tapped the glass over the register entry.

‘Number eighteen,’ she said. ‘Your label says it was empty.’

I checked the report. The property had been recorded as unoccupied.

‘Then the report was wrong,’ she replied. ‘Mr Petrov had his tailor’s shop downstairs. We lived above it.’

The woman was Mrs Petrov. She described the bakery that allowed customers to pay on Fridays, the yard where washing lines crossed like bunting and the upstairs room where somebody taught children to play the violin. She did not pretend that the houses were comfortable. In winter, ice formed inside her bedroom window, and the shared tap froze. Yet none of this made the street empty.

The next morning, she returned with a biscuit tin. Inside were rent books, school reports, dance tickets and letters. One letter described a noisy supper where three families had squeezed around a table. The council survey of the same building recorded only its damaged roof.

I began to notice how confidently the exhibition spoke. ‘The residents were moved.’ ‘The area was cleared.’ ‘Modern homes replaced the slums.’ The sentences were smooth because they left nobody inside them. Families became ‘residents’; arguments and friendships became ‘overcrowding’; an entire street became a problem already solved.

Mrs Petrov did not ask me to remove the survey. ‘The damp was real,’ she said. ‘But so were we.’

We changed the display. The official report remained, but beside it we placed extracts from letters and recorded memories from former residents. I removed the sentence describing number eighteen as empty when I discovered that the street had still been occupied at the time the entry was made. Above the records, we added a new heading: ‘What the boundary left out.’

On the exhibition’s opening day, visitors still read the official account first. It was the boldest text in the room. But it was no longer the last word. Behind it were voices disagreeing, remembering and correcting one another. The street had not become simpler. At last, our display had stopped asking it to be.

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 the effects of reducing people or places to a limited representation.

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