| Grade | A* | A | B | C | D | E |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mark (of 80) | 64+ | 56+ | 48+ | 40+ | 32+ | 24+ |
I was eighteen, my college classes were in the afternoon, and Verano’s on Cardinal Street wanted somebody to stand at a bench from ten at night until six in the morning and do exactly what she was told. I did not experience this as a decision. I experienced it as the only shape that would fit.
The head baker was called Tomás and he had worked that shift for thirty-one years. He owned no watch, and he never looked at the clock above the door, which had in any case been eleven minutes slow since long before I arrived. He measured the night in trays. Two trays of sourdough meant it was somewhere near midnight; the rye went in when the buses stopped; when the first small white rolls came out we were an hour from the delivery van and I could begin to think about my bicycle.
It was forty degrees beside the ovens in January. I have never since been as warm as I was that winter, or as cold as I was in the four minutes it took to wheel the trolley out to the yard, where the frost stood on the van in fern shapes and my breath went up through the security light like smoke off something burning.
The night has a population, and after a fortnight you know it by sight. There was a taxi driver who bought two custard tarts and never one. There was a nurse who came in at a quarter past five, still in her scrubs, and stood beside the ovens for precisely as long as it takes to drink a coffee without sitting down. There was a woman in a green coat who arrived at ten to five every single morning, bought one croissant, said thank you and nothing else, for eleven months. I never learned a single one of their names and I would recognise every one of them tomorrow.
The strangest part was not the work but the sleeping. I taped cardboard over the window and slept from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon, and for a year after I stopped, my body went on keeping the wrong appointments.
I went back to Cardinal Street last spring, at three in the morning, because I happened to be in the city and could not help myself. Verano’s is a phone shop now, lit blue and empty behind its shutter. But somewhere further along the street, out of a doorway I never found, came the smell of bread at the exact stage where the crust has begun to turn, and I stood in the middle of the road like an idiot until a cleaner came past with a trolley and asked me, quite kindly, whether I was all right. I said that I was. I was.
About one worker in six is now employed at least partly at night, and until recently almost no city planned for them. The night was handled as a policing matter rather than as a part of the day with needs of its own. That is beginning to change.
Forty-two cities have appointed a night commissioner, whose task is to coordinate transport, licensing, health and waste across the hours when a council is normally asleep. The commonest reform is transport. Buses are being extended to a full twenty-four hours, and along the corridors where cleaners and porters live rather than the routes serving the entertainment districts. Several cities have halved night fares, and a few require large employers to pay for transport home for staff finishing after midnight.
Lighting policy has changed direction. The instinct to flood a street with light is giving way to lower, warmer lamps placed where people walk, since very bright light creates black pockets by contrast and makes faces harder to read. Bus stops are redesigned for clear sightlines rather than higher wattage.
Services are moving into the night. Several cities run late clinics and pharmacies so that shift workers need not give up sleep to see a doctor, and two have opened publicly funded childcare that runs through the night for nurses and cleaners.
Licensing has been rethought. Staggered closing times stop thousands leaving venues in the same ten minutes. Agent-of-change rules place the cost of soundproofing on whoever arrives second, so a new block of flats beside an old music venue must insulate itself rather than complain the venue out of existence. Some cities designate night quarters, concentrating activity where it disturbs fewest residents.
Street teams of trained marshals, deliberately not police officers, help people find transport home and defuse trouble. Cities have begun to count, too: sensors and surveys measure who is out at night and where, because a census records where people sleep, not where they work. Employers are drawn in through training for night managers on sleep and shift health. Above all, a dozen authorities now publish a night-time strategy with a budget attached, which is the difference between an idea and a policy.
Ingrid Basara has been night commissioner of her city for four years. “For thirty years we asked one question about the night, which was how to stop trouble,” she says. “The night is not a problem to be contained. It is a working day with the lights off, and a sixth of this city is living in it. Once you accept that, everything else — the buses, the clinics, the lamps — is simply ordinary municipal work that somebody forgot to do.”
Councillor Peter Amankwah is more cautious. “I am not against any of this in principle, and I would be glad if the nurse on my street could get home,” he says. “But every one of these things has a price, and it comes out of the same budget as the schools. My postbag is not full of letters about night buses. It is full of letters from people who cannot sleep, and their needs are exactly as real. Before we spend on making the night busier, I would like to hear how we intend to make it quieter.”
I walk home across this city at two in the morning perhaps twice a week, and in eleven years I have never once walked in the dark. There is no dark left to walk in. The sky above the ring road is the colour of weak tea and has not been properly black in my lifetime; the clouds over the retail park hang there with a faint orange lining, like something left too long in an oven. We did not light this city. We poured light over it and let it run off the edges.
On the best night of a cold February, standing on the footbridge with my back to the depot, I can count eleven stars. My grandmother, who grew up two hundred miles north of here, could count more than that from her own back step without waiting for her eyes to settle.
Consider how profligate we are with the stuff. The office block on Harrow Street burns every one of its four hundred windows until dawn for the benefit of nobody whatever. The car park behind it is lit to the standard of an operating theatre so that forty empty spaces may be admired all night by no one at all. Something close to a third of everything we generate goes straight upwards into the sky, where it illuminates nothing and is simply spent.
Stranger still, all this light has not made us feel safer. It has made us furtive. Under a floodlight every face becomes a mask of shadow, and we hurry from one bright place to the next as though crossing open ground. Real seeing needs a little darkness to work in. The eye adapts if you let it: give it twenty minutes and it will hand you back an entire street — kerb, cat, cyclist and all — free of charge.
The brightest street in this city is not the safest one, and I can tell you precisely where it is. The underpass at Fenner Road is lit like a surgery from end to end, and nobody in their right mind walks through it after eleven. Two streets away there is a lane with four warm lamps, a laundrette that never closes and a man who sells coffee out of a hatch, and people wander down it at every hour without giving it a thought. Safety is not a quantity of lumens. Safety is other people, and other people are drawn by warmth rather than by wattage. We keep buying floodlights when what we needed was a reason to be outside.
I am not asking anybody to switch the city off. I am asking us to aim it. Point the lamps at the pavement instead of at the clouds, warm them, dim them after one o’clock, and hand back the hour that our grandparents were given for nothing. The last time I saw the Milky Way I was nine years old and forty miles from this desk, and I have not stopped resenting it since.
Read Text A: Small Hours in the insert, and then answer the questions below. Answer in your own words unless the question tells you otherwise. The number of marks tells you how many separate points to make.
She worked from ten at night until six in the morning, standing at a bench and doing exactly what she was told.
Her college classes were in the afternoon, so working through the night was the only pattern that fitted round them.
He never consulted a clock — he did not own a watch, and the one on the wall was wrong in any case. Instead he judged the hour by how far the baking had got, treating each batch as a unit of time, so that a particular bread coming out of the oven told him how much of the night was left. He also took his cue from the world outside, putting the rye in when the buses stopped.
She means that her body clock stayed set to the shift long after she had left it, so she went on waking, tiring and feeling hungry at night-shift times. Calling them “appointments” makes her body sound like a separate person still turning up to a job she had already given up, which shows how completely the year had rewired her.
The paragraph insists that the night is inhabited: “the night has a population”, and within a fortnight she can recognise it. What holds this community together is not conversation but repetition — the taxi driver who buys “two custard tarts and never one”, the woman in the green coat who arrives at ten to five for eleven months and says only thank you. These fixed habits hint at lives run on strict, tiring routines. The writer clearly feels affection for them, since she has noticed each one so exactly, and yet her closing sentence turns that affection into something sadder: she never learned a name, but she would recognise every face tomorrow. It is intimacy without acquaintance, which is a very particular kind of loneliness.
She sets the two extremes against each other in a single sentence: forty degrees beside the ovens, in January, and then the four minutes in the yard. Measuring the cold in minutes rather than degrees makes it something endured rather than recorded. The images are precise and physical — frost standing on the van “in fern shapes”, her breath going up through the security light “like smoke off something burning” — and the claim that she has never been so warm or so cold since tells us these were the outer limits of her life. What it suggests about the job is that it was punishing, and that she is far too proud of it to complain.
She feels a loss she cannot quite justify. Verano’s is now a phone shop, “lit blue and empty behind its shutter” — a cold, sealed light standing exactly where the ovens used to be — and she admits she went at three in the morning because she “could not help” it, which tells us how strong the pull still is. What restores the past is not the sight of the street but the smell of bread from a doorway she never finds, and smell brings a memory back whole rather than in pieces. She protects the paragraph from sentimentality by mocking herself: she stands in the road “like an idiot”. Then a cleaner with a trolley stops to ask whether she is all right, which is the memoir’s argument proved without being stated — the night population is still there and still looking after people. The last two sentences are the shortest in the piece: “I said that I was. I was.” The repetition converts a polite answer into a true one, and the ending comes to rest rather than mourning.
Read Text B: The other shift in the insert, and then answer both parts of this question.
One mark for each valid point, to a maximum of 10. Fifteen are available, so selection matters.
Cities are appointing commissioners to coordinate services after dark, and publishing funded strategies rather than leaving the night to the police. Transport is the main reform: buses run around the clock, routed where night workers live, fares are halved, and big employers may be required to pay for staff to get home. Lighting is being lowered and warmed rather than intensified, and stops redesigned for visibility. Clinics, pharmacies and childcare now open overnight. Licensing has been staggered to avoid sudden crowds, newcomers must soundproof against existing venues, and activity is concentrated in designated quarters. Trained marshals who are not police help people home, and cities are measuring who is actually out, since censuses record only where people sleep.
| Band | Marks | Descriptor |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 5 | Consistently the candidate’s own words. Points are grouped by theme — transport, lighting, services, licensing — rather than followed in text order, and linked economically so the summary reads as connected prose. No quotation, no comment, no wasted words, and within the limit. |
| 4 | 4 | Mainly own words with only isolated lifting of short phrases. Generally concise and well ordered, with some effective grouping. Occasional wordiness but the material is under control. |
| 3 | 3 | A mixture of own words and lifted material. Some organisation, but points largely follow the order of the article. Some repetition or unnecessary detail; the limit may be reached before the best points are used. |
| 2 | 2 | Frequent lifting of whole phrases and sentences. Little grouping; the answer reads as a list. Some irrelevance, or comment on the text rather than summary of it. |
| 1 | 1 | Largely copied with minimal reshaping, or so brief and disorganised that little continuous writing is demonstrated. |
These band descriptors are a study aid written for this site, not Cambridge’s published wording — the 0500 syllabus publishes assessment descriptors for Components 3 and 4 only.
Basara’s attitude is one of brisk impatience with the way the night has always been governed. She points out that for thirty years the only question asked about it was how to prevent trouble, and she refuses that framing entirely: the night, she argues, is simply a working day with the lights switched off, and a sixth of the city is already living in it. Notice that she argues from numbers rather than from sympathy, and that she deliberately makes the task sound unglamorous — buses and clinics are “ordinary municipal work that somebody forgot to do”, which implies neglect rather than difficulty and shows real confidence that it can be fixed. Amankwah is cautious rather than opposed. He says plainly that he is not against the idea and would be glad to see the nurse on his street get home, but he is thinking about a single budget that also pays for schools. His evidence is different from hers: he reads his postbag, and it is full of letters from people who cannot sleep, whose needs he insists are exactly as real. He is not defending the old view of night as a nuisance; he is asking whose comfort comes first.
Read Text C: In praise of the unlit hour in the insert, and then answer both parts of this question. The paragraphs are numbered from the top: paragraph 1 begins “I walk home across this city…”.
It means we are recklessly extravagant with light — we pour out far more of it than we need, without thinking, and get nothing back for what we spend.
It means we move nervously and secretively, as though we had something to hide, hurrying between the lit places as if we were being watched — so the light makes us look guilty rather than making us feel safe.
An office block on Harrow Street leaves four hundred windows lit all night although nobody is inside; the car park behind it is lit as brightly as an operating theatre for forty empty spaces; and about a third of all the light we produce escapes upwards into the sky, where it lights nothing at all.
He argues that glare actually reduces what you can see: the contrast throws everything outside the beam into blackness and turns faces into featureless shadow, and it stops the eye adjusting, which it will do by itself if given twenty minutes. More importantly, he thinks safety has almost nothing to do with light levels. What makes a street safe is other people using it, and people are attracted by warmth and by somewhere worth going rather than by wattage — which is why the underpass lit like a surgery is deserted after eleven while a dim lane with a laundrette and a coffee hatch is busy at any hour.
Paragraph 1 — ideas the examiner would credit:
Paragraph 5 — ideas the examiner would credit:
Devare opens with a contradiction — a man who walks at night and has “never once walked in the dark” — then resolves it with the blunt short sentence “There is no dark left to walk in.” The word “left” is doing the real work: it turns darkness into a dwindling resource before he has argued anything. His images are deliberately domestic. The sky is “the colour of weak tea”, stewed and dilute, and the clouds have “a faint orange lining, like something left too long in an oven”, so the damage is scorching by carelessness, not catastrophe. The central metaphor then arrives in two balanced sentences: “We did not light this city. We poured light over it and let it run off the edges.” Light becomes a liquid spilt rather than aimed, and “run off the edges” makes the waste visible.
Paragraph 5 argues by contrast. The underpass is “lit like a surgery from end to end” — clinical, exposing, nobody’s idea of comfort — which explains its emptiness before he mentions it. Against this he sets a lane with “a laundrette that never closes and a man who sells coffee out of a hatch”: the detail is warm and unimpressive on purpose, because his point is that safety is made of small ordinary things. “Safety is not a quantity of lumens” borrows the engineer’s vocabulary to defeat him, and the alliteration of “warmth rather than wattage” turns the whole argument into a phrase you can carry away.
| Band | Marks | Descriptor |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 9–10 | Judicious selection of a range of powerful choices, including imagery, from both paragraphs. Precise explanations of what the language means and of the effect created on the reader. Analysis works at the level of the individual word and the wider image, and connects choices to the writer’s purpose. The response is a piece of analysis, not a tour of the paragraph. |
| 4 | 7–8 | Good selection from both paragraphs, including imagery. Clear explanation of meaning and some genuine comment on effect, though one or two choices are explained more thinly, or the strongest images are handled less confidently than the plainer phrases. |
| 3 | 5–6 | Reasonable choices, but explanation tends towards paraphrase — saying what the phrase describes rather than what it does. Effects are asserted (“this makes it vivid”) more often than explained. Coverage may be uneven. |
| 2 | 3–4 | Some relevant choices identified, often with a technique labelled but not explored. Largely descriptive of content. Little sense of the reader’s response. |
| 1 | 1–2 | A few words quoted with minimal or repetitive comment, or general remarks about the passage with almost no reference to specific language. |
These band descriptors are a study aid written for this site, not Cambridge’s published wording — the 0500 syllabus publishes assessment descriptors for Components 3 and 4 only.
Imagine you live in the city described in Text C. Having read Anselm Devare’s article, you decide to write to Councillor Ada Whitlock, the leader of the city council, who is about to vote on a new street-lighting budget.
Write the letter you would send.
In your letter you should:
Base your letter on what you have read in Text C, but be careful to use your own words. Address each of the three bullet points. Begin your letter: Dear Councillor Whitlock.
Write 250–300 words. Up to 10 marks are available for the content of your answer, and up to 10 marks for the quality of your writing.
Credit is given for using the text intelligently: selecting the right material for each bullet, developing it into an argument, and sounding like a real resident writing to a real councillor. A letter that retells the article in order will not reach the top bands however accurate it is.
Dear Councillor Whitlock,
I have lived here eleven years and walk home across the city twice a week at two in the morning. In all that time I have never walked in darkness, because there is none left. The sky above the ring road is the colour of weak tea; the cloud over the retail park has a permanent orange lining. On the clearest night of February I count eleven stars from the footbridge. My grandmother could count more from her own back step, and she was not doing anything clever.
I am not writing about the view. I am writing because we spend your budget on light we then throw away. The office block on Harrow Street burns four hundred windows until dawn for nobody; the car park behind it is lit to surgical standards so that forty empty spaces can be admired; and roughly a third of everything we generate goes straight up into the sky, lighting nothing.
Worse, it does not work. Very bright light creates very deep shadow, so a face under a floodlight becomes a mask and we see less, not more. It stops the eye adjusting, which it does by itself, free of charge, in twenty minutes. And it moves people along instead of keeping them out. The underpass at Fenner Road is the brightest place in this city and nobody walks through it after eleven; the lane behind it has four warm lamps, a laundrette and a coffee hatch, and is busy all night.
So I am not asking you to switch the city off. I am asking you to aim it: lamps pointed down, warmer bulbs, dimmed after one o’clock, and offices dark when empty. Please spend the money on reasons to be outside.
Yours sincerely,
| Band | Reading | Descriptor — use of the text |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 9–10 | Thorough and well-selected use of Text C across all three bullets. Ideas are developed and evaluated rather than repeated, and are re-expressed convincingly in the voice of a resident writing to a decision-maker. A clear sense of an argument built for a particular reader, including anticipation of the objections that reader would raise. |
| 4 | 7–8 | Competent, mainly relevant use of the text with some development. All three bullets covered, though one is thinner than the others. The voice is generally sustained; some evaluation is present but not consistent. |
| 3 | 5–6 | Straightforward use of the text with limited development. Points largely reproduced in the order they appear in the article. One bullet may be treated very briefly. Some lifting of phrasing. |
| 2 | 3–4 | Some relevant material, but coverage is uneven and at least one bullet is undeveloped or missing. Frequent lifting; little sense of a writer or a reader. |
| 1 | 1–2 | Occasional relevant reference to the text; largely general assertion, or material unrelated to the task. |
| Band | Writing | Descriptor — quality of writing |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 9–10 | Register is consistently right for a formal letter to an elected official: courteous, confident, never chatty and never pompous. Ideas are ordered persuasively, with a purposeful opening and a clear request at the end. Vocabulary is wide and precise; sentence lengths are varied for emphasis. Letter conventions handled without fuss. Spelling, punctuation and grammar almost faultless. |
| 4 | 7–8 | Clear and generally well-suited to a formal letter, with some effective persuasive control. Sound structure and mostly precise vocabulary. Occasional lapses of register or a flat passage; errors are minor and do not impede meaning. |
| 3 | 5–6 | Generally clear, with the form recognisable but inconsistently maintained — the letter may drift into an essay or into over-familiarity. Vocabulary adequate rather than chosen. Sentence structures repetitive. Some errors, but the meaning stays clear. |
| 2 | 3–4 | Simple and sometimes disjointed. Little sense of audience; the piece reads as notes or as a general opinion. Limited vocabulary and frequent errors, some of which blur meaning. |
| 1 | 1–2 | Very limited control of expression; frequent errors that obscure meaning; no sense of the required form. |
These band descriptors are a study aid written for this site, not Cambridge’s published wording — the 0500 syllabus publishes assessment descriptors for Components 3 and 4 only.