Narrate an incident from your own experience when you helped a friend who was in trouble. Explain what happened. What did you do to make the situation better?

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 375 words)

WHAT I DID FOR IMRAN

Imran stopped coming to school in the second week of September, and for four days nobody in our class could tell me why.

I went to his house on the Saturday. His mother opened the door and looked at me for slightly too long before letting me in, and Imran was sitting on the floor of the front room with the school Chemistry book open in front of him, not reading it.

What had happened came out over about forty minutes, in pieces. His father had lost his job at the end of August. The fees for the second term were due on the fifteenth. His parents had decided — not told him, decided — that he would finish Class Ten at the government school near the station, where there were no fees, and he had been at home since because he could not face saying goodbye to anybody.

I want to be honest about what I did next, because it was not dramatic.

I did not offer money; we did not have any to offer, and I knew it would have humiliated him. What I did first was simply argue with him for an hour about the not-coming-to-school part, on the grounds that his fees were paid until the fifteenth and he was wasting days he had already been given. He came back on Monday.

The second thing was the useful one. My mother teaches, and I asked her whether the school had any provision, and she said there was a fund but that nobody ever applied to it because nobody knew it existed and because asking was embarrassing. She wrote down what was required. I took the list to Imran’s mother rather than to Imran, which I thought about carefully beforehand.

The application took three weeks and was granted in part — not the whole fee, but two-thirds of it, renewable.

He sat his boards with us. He is studying engineering in Durgapur and we speak most weeks.

What I have kept from it is not a good feeling about myself. It is the knowledge that the help that mattered was information, not sympathy, and that I very nearly did not think to ask.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

THREE tasks, and content marks are counted against all three:

1. NARRATE the incident
2. EXPLAIN WHAT HAPPENED — the friend’s trouble, clearly set out
3. WHAT YOU DID to make the situation better

The third is the heart of the question and should be the longest section. A composition that describes a friend’s misfortune for 350 words and adds "I consoled him" has answered a third of it.

CHOOSE A TROUBLE YOU CAN ACTUALLY SOLVE. The temptation is an accident or a serious illness, where a fifteen-year-old can do nothing but wait. A problem with a practical remedy — money, information, an intervention — lets you answer task three properly.

AVOID SELF-CONGRATULATION. Notice that the model says plainly that what it did was "not dramatic" and ends by admitting it nearly failed to think of the useful thing. Modesty reads as honesty, and examiners reward it. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see "Composition — grade bands and marking" in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter, along with the worked model for this composition type.

USE THIS AS A MODEL, NOT AS AN ANSWER TO MEMORISE. The question asks for an ORIGINAL composition, and every year examiners identify scripts reproduced from guide books; a memorised answer can be penalised for plagiarism and will in any case read as borrowed. Study this piece for its STRUCTURE — how it opens, how the paragraphs are ordered, where the required tasks are answered, how it ends — and then write your own, about your own school, your own family, your own town. Your own specific detail is worth more marks than anyone else’s polished sentence.