Summers are becoming hotter with each passing year. Write a description of one such very hot day. What did you see and hear as you walked outside? How were birds and animals affected?

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 340 words)

THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF MAY

The bus driver was ill, so on the twenty-fourth of May I walked home from school at one in the afternoon, which is the worst hour of the worst month, and I had left my cap on the hook by the door.

The first thing was the road itself. Bitumen at that hour does not look solid; it shimmers about a foot above the surface so that the far end of the street seems to be underwater, and it gives off its heat upwards into your face as steadily as an oven with the door left open. My sandals were sticking very slightly at each step.

It was deserted. That was the strangest part. At one o’clock on Jessore Road there are normally forty people in sight, and there were perhaps four — all of them on the shaded side, all walking the way people walk in that heat, which is slowly and without lifting their feet much.

The sounds had gone too. No horns, no hawkers, no radio from the cycle shop. What was left was a single koel somewhere behind the houses, calling and calling and getting no answer, and the electric whine of a transformer on the pole outside the bank, which you never hear when there is other noise.

The animals had worked it out better than the people had. Three dogs lay in the gutter outside the fish market where a tap had been dripping all morning, half in the water, entirely flat, and did not lift their heads as I passed. A cow stood absolutely still in the shade of the flyover pillar. On the wires above me a row of crows sat with their beaks open, panting, which I had never seen before and which upset me more than anything else that afternoon.

I finished my water bottle at the halfway mark. The walk takes twenty minutes.

It has taken longer every year since, and I have never again forgotten the cap.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

THREE tasks, all carrying content marks:

1. DESCRIBE one very hot day
2. what you SAW AND HEARD as you walked outside — both verbs are named
3. how BIRDS AND ANIMALS were affected

The third is a SEPARATE SECTION with its own marks, and it is what candidates reduce to one line. Give it a full paragraph, and cover both birds AND animals — the question names both.

SOUND is the sense most often omitted in descriptions. Here it is particularly effective because heat produces an ABSENCE of sound, and describing what is missing is a sophisticated move: no horns, no hawkers, and then the two noises that are audible only because everything else has stopped.

One precise observation is worth ten general ones. Crows sitting with their beaks open, panting, does more than a paragraph about suffering animals. 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.