You had been waiting outside the examination hall. Describe what you saw and the sounds you heard when you arrived at the place. What were your feelings? Describe how the scene changed once you entered the hall and the examination started.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 385 words)

NINE FIFTEEN

I reached the centre at nine fifteen for an examination that began at ten, which was forty minutes earlier than necessary and exactly as early as everybody else had come.

The gate was shut and about two hundred of us were pressed against it on the pavement outside. What you notice first is that everyone is wearing the same expression, and that it is not fear exactly but a kind of wound-up blankness. Nobody was standing still. Boys were walking in short lines of four paces and turning, over and over. A girl near the wall was reading a chapter aloud to herself with her eyes shut and her finger moving.

The sound was the strangest part. Two hundred people and no conversation — only a low continuous mutter, everybody reciting something under their breath at once, like a very large and unhappy prayer meeting. Over it: the rattle of the gate each time somebody tested it, a mother at the corner giving instructions she had certainly given at home, and somewhere down the road a bus.

My own feelings I can describe precisely, because I kept checking them. My hands were cold, which they never are. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat. I had read the same three formulae eleven times and they had stopped meaning anything, and I had reached the stage — familiar from every examination — of being convinced that I knew nothing whatever and had wasted a year.

Then the gate opened at half past nine and everything changed.

It changed first outside: the mutter stopped, the crowd turned into a queue, and people began putting away books they had been holding like lifebuoys. Inside, the corridor was cool and smelt of floor polish, and the hall itself had been arranged into those long ruled rows of single desks that exist nowhere else in the world.

And once the papers came round, the noise simply went. Two hundred people, and by five past ten the loudest sound in that hall was pens.

That is the part nobody warns you about. All the fear is outside the gate. Once the paper is in front of you there is no room for it, because there is work to do.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

FOUR tasks, and all four carry content marks:

1. what you SAW on arriving
2. the SOUNDS you heard
3. your FEELINGS
4. how the scene CHANGED once you entered the hall and the examination started

The fourth is a SEPARATE MOVEMENT and must have real space. A composition that describes the crowd outside for 380 words has answered three quarters of the question. Notice that the model gives the change its own clear turning point ("Then the gate opened") and two full paragraphs afterwards.

SOUND is named explicitly, so it cannot be a single line. The strongest observation available here is that the noise CHANGES character — a collective mutter outside, near-silence inside — which lets you answer tasks 2 and 4 together.

FEELINGS should be shown through physical detail (cold hands, heartbeat in the throat) rather than named. "I was very nervous" is worth far less than the same information rendered. 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.