RCF Model Paper 1: IGCSE ESL Reading and Writing

Read the article about a travelling night market, and then answer the questions.

[8 marks]

The market that packs itself away

At six o'clock on a Thursday evening, the car park behind the sports ground is empty except for gulls. By half past seven it has become the busiest place in Marchbourne, and by midnight there is no sign that anything happened there at all.

The travelling night market arrived in the town four years ago and now visits on the first Thursday of every month. It began with nine stalls. It currently has fifty-one, and a waiting list that its organiser, Priya Anand, describes as "embarrassingly long".

"People assume the hard part is the cooking," she says. "It isn't. The hard part is the packing away. Every trader has ninety minutes at the end, and if the car park isn't spotless by one in the morning we lose the licence. We have never lost the licence."

The market's rules are unusual. No stall may sell something another stall already sells, which is why the waiting list is long: an applicant offering noodles has to wait for the existing noodle trader to leave. Nothing may be pre-cooked at home. And every trader must be able to set up and dismantle their stall alone, without help, in under twenty minutes.

That last rule was Anand's idea, and it was not popular. "Three traders left over it," she admits. "But it changed who applied. We stopped getting people who wanted a shop and started getting people who wanted a market."

The traders themselves offer a different explanation for the market's success. Tomas Berg, who has sold bread there since the second month, thinks it is simply the hour. "Nobody is in a hurry at nine at night," he says. "In a daytime market people are buying because they need something. Here they are buying because they are enjoying themselves. It is a completely different customer, and honestly it is a much nicer one."

Not everyone in Marchbourne agrees. A shopkeeper on the high street, who asked not to be named, said the market takes trade from businesses that pay rent all year. Anand does not accept this. She points out that the market's own survey found that two thirds of visitors went on to a café or a restaurant in the town afterwards.

The council reviews the licence every March. So far it has been renewed each time, and last year it was extended to allow a second market in December. Anand has already refused it. "Twice a month and it becomes ordinary," she says. "The whole point is that you have to wait."

Questions

1. How often does the night market visit Marchbourne? [1]
2. How many stalls does the market have now? [1]
3. According to Priya Anand, what would happen if the car park were not clean by one in the morning? [1]
4. Why does an applicant who wants to sell noodles have to wait? [1]
5. What reason does Tomas Berg give for the market's success? [1]
6. Give three things the market's rules do not allow. [3]

Read the five short texts, A to E, in which five people describe the first job they ever had. Then answer the questions.

[9 marks]

A - Ifeoma

I was fifteen and I worked Saturdays in my aunt's fabric shop, which sounds gentle and was not. My job was to re-roll every bolt of cloth a customer had opened, and customers open a great deal of cloth. What I learned had nothing to do with fabric. My aunt could tell within a minute whether someone intended to buy, and she was never rude to the ones who did not. I asked her once why she spent so long with them. She said they talk to their friends. Twenty years later I run a small team and I still think about that.

B - Marek

My first job was delivering newspapers before school, and I took it entirely for the money, because I wanted a particular bicycle. I got the bicycle after four months. What I did not expect was that I would keep the job for another two years after I had stopped needing it. Being outside at six in the morning in an empty street, in every kind of weather, turned out to be the part of the day I liked best. I have never since had work that gave me an hour to myself before anyone else was awake.

C - Salma

I washed dishes in a hotel kitchen for one summer, and I was extremely bad at it for the first fortnight. The head chef never once shouted at me, which I have been told is unusual. He simply came over, stood beside me, and washed dishes at my elbow at twice my speed until I understood what I was doing wrong. He never explained it in words. I do not think he could have. I now teach, and I have never forgotten how much faster that was than being told.

D - Hugo

I sold ice cream from a kiosk on the seafront, and the money was terrible. I mention that first because everyone assumes a seaside job in summer is a holiday. It is nine hours standing up. But I was seventeen and I had never spoken to strangers in my life, and by August I could talk to anybody. My mother says I came home a different person. I would not recommend the wages to anyone. I would recommend the job to everyone.

E - Bea

I worked in a garden centre, watering. Thousands of plants, twice a day, and if you missed a tray on Friday you found out on Monday. Nobody checked my work, which at sixteen I found astonishing and slightly frightening. The manager told me at the end of the summer that she had known about every tray I had missed, and had let me discover them myself because that was the only way I would remember. I was annoyed for about a week. Then I understood, and I have managed people the same way ever since.

Questions

Which person, A, B, C, D or E, says the following? Write one letter for each question. [9 marks]

1. The pay was poor and the work was physically tiring. [1]
2. They were shown how to do something rather than told. [1]
3. They stayed in the job after their original reason for taking it had gone. [1]
4. They learned to be patient with people who were not going to buy anything. [1]
5. Their family noticed a change in them. [1]
6. They were left to find their own mistakes on purpose. [1]
7. They valued being alone at an early hour. [1]
8. They now use the same approach in their own work. [1]
9. They were surprised not to be supervised. [1]

Read the article about a school bicycle workshop, and then complete the notes.

[7 marks]

The workshop under the stairs

Three years ago the cupboard under the stairs at Northfield Secondary School held broken chairs. It now holds a bicycle workshop that repairs about forty bicycles a term, and it is run entirely by students.

The idea came from a Year 10 student, Kofi Mensah, who noticed that the bicycle racks were full of machines nobody rode. "Half of them had flat tyres," he says. "That is a ten-minute job. People were walking to school past a bicycle they owned."

The workshop opens at lunchtime on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Any student may bring a bicycle. Repairs are free, but there is a condition: the owner has to stay and help. Nobody may drop a bicycle off and collect it later. "That was the argument we had," says Mensah. "It would be quicker to just fix them. But then we would be a repair shop, and in two years when we leave, it closes."

Tools were the first problem. The school gave forty pounds, which bought almost nothing. A local cycle shop then donated a set of worn tools it was replacing, and a parent lent a stand. Spare parts are still the difficulty: inner tubes and brake blocks are bought from a small charge made when a repair needs a new part, currently two pounds regardless of what the part is.

Nine students now work in the workshop, of whom six were taught by the other three. None had any experience before joining. The school's site manager, Ellen Poole, supervises but is not allowed to touch a spanner, a rule the students themselves insisted on. "They were quite firm about it," she says. "I sit and read."

The measurable result is that bicycle journeys to school have risen from about thirty a day to just over a hundred. The result Mensah cares about is different. "Two of the students in there want to be engineers now," he says. "They did not before. That came out of a cupboard."

Notes: The Northfield bicycle workshop

Complete the notes. Write one or two words or a short phrase on each line. [7 marks]

1. Where the workshop is: .......................................... [1]
2. Number of bicycles repaired each term: .......................................... [1]
3. Days it opens: .......................................... [1]
4. The condition for a free repair: .......................................... [1]
5. Where the tools came from: .......................................... [1]
6. Charge made when a new part is needed: .......................................... [1]
7. What the site manager is not allowed to do: .......................................... [1]

Read the article about replacing homework with reading, and then answer the questions.

[6 marks]

The school that abolished homework

When Ardenwood Secondary announced that it was replacing all homework for students under fourteen with thirty minutes of reading, the letters began within a week. Roughly two thirds of them were furious.

"I had expected some resistance," says the head teacher, Grace Okonjo. "I had not expected the reason. Almost nobody wrote to say that children would learn less. They wrote to say it was unfair - that other schools set homework, that their child would fall behind in comparison. It was an anxiety about position, not about learning."

The policy is simpler than it sounds. Students under fourteen are asked to read anything they choose for half an hour, five evenings a week, and to record only the title and the number of pages. There is no comprehension exercise, no summary, and no mark. Teachers do not check whether the reading is difficult enough. A student who reads the same comic book for a month is not corrected.

"The moment you ask them to prove it, it becomes homework again," Okonjo says. "And the moment it becomes homework, half of them stop enjoying it. We decided we would rather they read something easy than nothing at all."

Two years in, the school's own figures show that the proportion of under-fourteens reading daily has risen from under a quarter to just over three quarters. Reading ages have risen by an average of eleven months more than would be expected. Results in mathematics and science are unchanged.

That last finding is the one Okonjo mentions most often, because it was the one she was warned about. "Everyone told me the sciences would suffer without practice at home. They have not moved at all, in either direction. What that tells me is not that homework is harmful. It is that the homework we were setting was doing very little."

Other schools have been slower to follow than she expected. Several head teachers have visited, looked at the figures, and gone away without changing anything. Okonjo is sympathetic. "It is a frightening thing to remove, because if it goes wrong you cannot hide it. And you are answering to parents who measure the school by how much work their child brings home. I understand that. I simply think they are measuring the wrong thing."

The policy is now being extended to students up to sixteen, though with one change: those preparing for examinations will keep subject homework in their examination subjects. Okonjo describes this as a compromise she is not entirely comfortable with, but says that it was the price of the governors' agreement.

Questions

Write the letter A, B or C for each question. [6 marks]

1. What surprised Grace Okonjo about the letters she received? A How many there were. B The reason people objected. C That teachers wrote as well as parents. [1]
2. What are students asked to record about their reading? A Only the title and the number of pages. B A short summary of what they read. C Whether they found it difficult. [1]
3. Why does the school not check that the reading is challenging enough? A Teachers do not have time. B Students would choose harder books anyway. C Checking would turn reading back into homework. [1]
4. What does the school's data show about mathematics and science results? A They have improved slightly. B They have fallen slightly. C They have not changed. [1]
5. What conclusion does Okonjo draw from the science results? A That homework harms learning. B That the homework previously set achieved little. C That science needs a different kind of homework. [1]
6. How does Okonjo feel about the change made for examination students? A She is not completely happy with it. B She believes it improves the policy. C She expects it to be reversed soon. [1]

You recently spent a week doing work experience somewhere unexpected. A friend has written to ask about it.

Write an email to your friend.

[15 marks: 6 for content, 9 for language]

In your email you should:

• explain where you did your work experience and how you ended up there;
• describe one thing that surprised you;
• say whether you would want to do that kind of work in the future, and why.

Your friend has written:

"So how was it? Everyone I know ended up in an office and hated it, so I want to hear that yours was better. Was it what you expected? Would you actually do that job?"

Instructions

• Write 120 to 160 words.
• Write in an informal style.
• Do not write any addresses.

Your school is deciding whether to keep its library open for two hours after the end of the school day. The head teacher has asked students to send in their views.

Write a report for the head teacher.

[15 marks: 6 for content, 9 for language]

In your report you should:

• explain how students currently use the library and when it is busiest;
• describe the main difficulty students face with the present opening hours;
• recommend what the school should do, and give a reason.

Instructions

• Write 120 to 160 words.
• Write in a formal style.
• Give your report a title, and use sub-headings.