Describe a time when all the lights in your locality went off. What were the sounds you heard as you sat in the darkness? How did you feel when the lights came on?

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 335 words)

THE NIGHT THE LANE WENT DARK

It happened at ten past nine on a Tuesday in May, and the first thing I noticed was not the darkness but the SILENCE.

Three fans stopped in our flat at the same instant. The refrigerator, which I had never once heard, stopped with a shudder and a click. The television went out mid-sentence. For perhaps two seconds there was nothing at all, and it was the most complete quiet I have ever experienced indoors.

Then the lane began to speak.

Somebody two houses down said a word my mother would not let me repeat. A child on the second floor opposite started to cry, and was hushed. Doors opened all along the row — that particular scrape of a bolt drawn back — and people came out onto their balconies, because that is what everybody does, although there is nothing whatever to see. The Mishras’ dog set up a long complaint. Somewhere a generator coughed twice and failed to start, then coughed again and caught, and settled into that flat diesel drone that means one household has given up on the electricity board.

We sat on the balcony with two candles. My father made tea on the gas and my grandmother told us, for the fourth time in my life, about the power cuts of 1978, which she clearly remembers with more affection than she admits. Below us the lane talked to itself in the dark — voices calling from balcony to balcony, people who do not ordinarily speak asking each other whether it was the whole area or only this side.

It went on for two hours and twenty minutes.

When the lights came back the whole lane cheered, which was ridiculous and which I joined in. The fans restarted. The refrigerator resumed its noise. Everyone went indoors within four minutes.

What I felt, honestly, was relief — and underneath it a small, unreasonable disappointment that I have never quite been able to explain.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

THREE tasks, each carrying content marks:

1. DESCRIBE the occasion
2. what SOUNDS you heard as you sat in the darkness
3. how you FELT when the lights came on

The second is unusual and is the whole point of the question. Because it is dark, SIGHT IS UNAVAILABLE — so the description must be built almost entirely of sound, and a candidate who writes about what the street looked like has not understood the task. Notice how much of the model is listening: the fans stopping, the bolt drawn back, the dog, the generator failing and catching.

The third task asks for a FEELING, so the composition must end with a response rather than with the lights returning. The most interesting answers admit something slightly unexpected, as the model does with its closing disappointment.

Specific times and numbers — ten past nine, two hours and twenty minutes, four minutes — make a description sound observed rather than invented. 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.