Select any one of the following. (Do not spend more than 20 minutes on this question.)
Your uncle has offered to get you a pet for your birthday. Write a letter to him telling him what you would like, give reasons for your choice and tell him how you would take care of your pet.
Topic: Informal letter (letter of request/thanks)
Answer
MODEL ANSWER
12, Subash Nagar Agra 282002
10 June 2018
Dear Kaku,
Your letter arrived on Tuesday and I have thought about almost nothing else since. Thank you — it is by some distance the best offer anybody has made me.
What I would like is a Labrador, and preferably not a puppy. There is a shelter on Fatehabad Road that has three adult dogs waiting, and the one I have been to see twice is a four-year-old called Biscuit whose family moved abroad and left him.
My reasons are these. A Labrador suits our house — we have the terrace and the small garden, and they need room to move. They are famously patient with children, which matters because Piu is only six. And an older dog is already trained, which a puppy is not, and is far less likely to be returned. The shelter says the adult dogs almost never get chosen.
As for looking after him, I have worked it out properly rather than promising vaguely. He would be walked twice a day — before school at six and again at seven in the evening — and I would do both. Feeding, water and the weekly bath would be mine. I have found out what the vaccinations cost and when they fall due, and Ma has agreed that the food would come out of my own money if I take on the newspaper delivery, which I am willing to do.
I know a dog is twelve years and not twelve months. I have thought about that more than about the dog itself.
Do let me know what you think. And come and meet him before you decide — the shelter is open on Sundays.
With much love, Tia
WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES
THREE tasks, and content marks are counted against all three:
- WHAT you would like
- REASONS for your choice
- HOW you would take care of it
One paragraph each is the clearest structure.
FORMAT: an INFORMAL letter to an uncle — no receiver’s address, no subject line, close with "With much love" or "Yours affectionately", never "Yours faithfully".
THE THIRD TASK is where this letter is won. "I will take good care of it and love it very much" is worth almost nothing. A specific plan — walked twice daily at named times, vaccinations costed, food paid for from your own earnings — shows you have understood what the question is really testing, which is RESPONSIBILITY rather than enthusiasm.
The line about twelve years rather than twelve months is the kind of thought an adult reader notices, and tone carries marks here. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see the Formal Letter and Informal Letter references in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter.
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.