You are a regular visitor to your school library. Describe your library. Give details of the familiar sights. What do you see and feel as different students come in and check out the books? Why is this place so important?

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 340 words)

THE LONG ROOM

Our library is on the first floor at the end of the corridor, and the first thing you notice about it is the temperature. It is always two degrees cooler than the rest of the building, because the windows face north and the old peepul outside has never been cut back.

It is one long room with a high ceiling. Eleven wooden almirahs stand along the walls, their glass fronts cloudy at the corners. Fiction runs down the left side, reference along the right, and the periodicals sit on a rack near the door with last month’s issues sliding off it. There are four tables, each with six chairs, and a fifth table by the window that everyone wants and nobody books. The floor is red oxide, polished dark down the middle where thirty years of feet have walked.

And the smell — old paper, gum, floor polish, and on damp days a faint mustiness from the bottom shelves that Mrs. D’Souza is always complaining about.

The people are the better part of it. The Class Twelve students come in with the air of people who own the place and take the window table. The little ones from Four and Five arrive in a row and go straight to the picture books, and one of them always tries to take out the atlas, which is too heavy for him, and is always allowed to. There is a boy in my year who comes every single day and reads only about ships. There are two girls who come to talk and pretend to read, and Mrs. D’Souza knows perfectly well and lets them, up to a point.

What I feel, watching them, is something I have never quite been able to name — a kind of quiet gladness that all these different people have somewhere to go.

That is why the place matters. Not for the books, though the books are the reason it exists. It matters because it is the only room in the school where nobody is being told what to do.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

FOUR tasks are named, and content marks are counted against all four:

1. DESCRIBE the library
2. give details of the FAMILIAR SIGHTS
3. what you SEE AND FEEL as different students come and go
4. WHY the place is important

The third and fourth are separate from the first two and must have their own sections. A composition that describes shelves for 340 words has answered half the question.

Note the word FEEL. The question asks for a response, not only an observation, so at least one paragraph must be about you rather than the room.

For the description, use sensory detail beyond sight — the temperature, the smell of old paper and floor polish. And use specific numbers and nouns: eleven almirahs, red oxide floor, the boy who reads only about ships. 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.