Narrate an incident from your experience in which your parents had entrusted you with a difficult task. Give details of the task, how you carried it out and your feelings at the end.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 330 words)

THE KEY

When my father went into hospital for his bypass in the November of Class Nine, he called me into the room while the ambulance was being arranged and gave me the key to the shop.

I want to be clear about what that meant. My father sells hardware — nails, hinges, paint, pipe fittings — from a shop the size of a large cupboard on Jessore Road. He opens at eight and closes at nine, six and a half days a week, and had not missed a day in nineteen years. My mother could not run it; she was at the hospital. So I was to open the shop for eleven days.

The first morning was the worst. I did not know the prices. I did not know that the grey pipe and the white pipe were different things sold to different people. A contractor asked for a half-inch elbow and I handed him something that was not an elbow, and he looked at me the way you look at a child behind a counter, which is what I was.

What saved me was Ratan-da, who runs the paint shop next door, and who came over unasked at nine-fifteen, sat on the stool by the door, and stayed. He did not serve anyone. He simply named the things when I could not, and let the customers see that someone was watching.

By the fourth day I had made a price list in a school notebook. By the seventh I stopped needing it for the common items. I kept the day’s takings in an envelope with the date on it, and I did not once get the accounts wrong, which I know because my father checked all eleven envelopes from his bed.

He did not say very much when he checked them. He said the sixth day was short by forty rupees and I said I knew, I had given credit to the old man from Dumdum, and he nodded and said that was right, that one always gave credit to that man.

I have never in my life felt taller than I did in that hospital room.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

THREE things are named, and content marks are counted against all three:

1. DETAILS OF THE TASK — what exactly you were asked to do, and why it was difficult
2. HOW YOU CARRIED IT OUT — the process, including what went wrong
3. YOUR FEELINGS AT THE END

Budget roughly a third each. The commonest failure is 280 words on the task and one line on the feelings.

The word DIFFICULT must be earned. A task that turns out to be easy, or that you complete faultlessly at the first attempt, has not answered the question — SHOW the difficulty by showing a failure along the way.

The ending should convey feeling rather than announce it. "I felt very proud and happy" is worth less than a scene in which the pride is visible. 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.