What do you prefer — morning, afternoon, evening or night? Describe your favourite time of the day. What are the sights, sounds, smells and feelings that you associate with your favourite time of the day? Why do you like this part of the day better than the others?

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 340 words)

FIVE TO SIX

I prefer the hour before sunrise, and I am aware that this makes me sound insufferable, since I am sixteen and nobody believes a boy of sixteen gets up at five voluntarily.

At five the lane is still a blue colour. Not dark — dark was an hour ago — but a thin washed blue that comes up the street before the sun does, and in which everything has an edge and no colour. The shutters of the tea shop are down. The three cars parked outside number eleven are under their covers, beaded with dew. From our balcony you can see the whole length of Lake View Road empty, which you cannot see at any other hour of the twenty-four.

The sounds arrive in an order I have learnt by heart. First the crows, who start before the light and have nothing pleasant to say. Then, about ten past five, the milkman’s cycle — you hear the carrier rattling two lanes away. The first bus on the main road at twenty past, a long way off and unmistakable. Somebody’s bucket against a tap. And under all of it a silence that is not the silence of night, because it has things moving in it.

The smells are two. Wet earth, from the tulsi pots my mother waters at ten to five, which is a smell that does not exist after seven. And, by half past, the first tea of the day.

What I feel in that hour is difficult to name. Something like ownership. The day has not yet been given to anybody — no school, no timetable, nobody wanting anything — and for sixty minutes it belongs entirely to me.

That is why I like it better than the rest. The afternoon is other people’s. The evening is homework. The night is tired. The hour before sunrise is the only part of the day that arrives unspoken for, and I have never yet had one taken away from me.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

FOUR tasks, and content marks are counted against all of them:

1. WHICH time of day you prefer — state it at once
2. DESCRIBE it
3. the SIGHTS, SOUNDS, SMELLS and FEELINGS — all four are named in the question, so all four must appear
4. WHY you like it BETTER THAN THE OTHERS — a comparison, not just praise

The third is the heart of the question. Because the paper names four categories, the safest structure is a paragraph for each — and SMELL is the one candidates omit. The model gives it its own short paragraph deliberately.

The fourth task requires you to dismiss the alternatives. A composition that praises the morning without ever mentioning afternoon, evening or night has answered three quarters of the question. One sentence on each is enough.

Specific times and specific nouns — ten past five, the milkman’s carrier, tulsi pots — are what earn the descriptive marks. 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.