Narrate an incident from your own experience when you helped to prepare a meal. Explain what you did and what you gained from the experience.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 375 words)

THE DAY WE COOKED

My mother went to Ranchi for a funeral on a Thursday in October and came back on the Sunday, and in those four days my father and I discovered that neither of us could cook.

This came as a genuine surprise to both of us. My father is a man who can rewire a house. I was fifteen and had eaten three meals a day for fifteen years. Between us we had watched perhaps forty thousand meals being prepared, and it turned out that watching is not the same as knowing anything at all.

Thursday we ate from the restaurant. Friday we ate from the restaurant again and my father said something about it being a waste. On Saturday we decided to make khichuri, on the grounds that it was one pot and rice and dal and how difficult could it be.

My jobs were the vegetables and the spices. I discovered that a potato takes considerably longer to peel than it appears to when somebody else is doing it, that an onion is a genuinely upsetting object at close range, and that I did not know what turmeric looked like. I had to telephone my mother about the turmeric, and she laughed for some time before answering.

My father managed the rice and the heat. We got the proportion of water wrong — too much, badly — and what we produced at half past eight was not khichuri but a kind of soup with things in it.

We ate all of it. It was not good. We had a second helping anyway, standing up in the kitchen, and my father said it was the best thing he had eaten all week, which was a lie and which I have not forgotten.

What I gained was not a recipe. It was a piece of arithmetic that had never occurred to me: my mother does this every day, twice, for four people, after work, and has done for nineteen years, and nobody in that house has ever once said it was difficult — because we had all assumed, from watching, that it was easy.

I do the vegetables now. It is not much. It is what I can do.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

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

1. NARRATE THE INCIDENT
2. EXPLAIN WHAT YOU DID — your specific part in it
3. WHAT YOU GAINED from the experience

The second is easily swallowed by the first, so make sure your own actions are visible as a separate thread — here, the vegetables and the spices.

THE THIRD TASK is where the composition is won or lost. Avoid the obvious ("I learnt that cooking is difficult"). A gain that reframes something the narrator had never noticed — here, the arithmetic of his mother’s nineteen years — is what lifts it into the top band.

HUMOUR is permitted and rewarded in personal narrative. The onion at close range and the telephone call about turmeric cost nothing and make the account sound lived rather than composed.

Keep the first person and the past tense throughout. 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.