Two tasks in ninety minutes, with the plan already open on both. Write the answer with the plan in front of you, press Check to see the model and the criteria, then clear the support and write it a second time without it. Keep the first version. The second one is the one that tells you what you can do alone.
This is the scaffolded mock: every part opens with its support showing. Use it, check, then clear it and try the part alone — that second attempt is the one to watch.
You must answer this question. Read the two texts and write an essay of 240–280 words. Summarise and evaluate the key points from both texts, in your own words as far as possible. Write in an academic register, for a tutor. There are two jobs in that instruction, and the plan below is built around keeping them apart.
Text 1 — from a handbook for speechwriters
A borrowed line is not a confession of poverty; it is an invitation. When a speaker quotes, the audience hears a cadence it has heard before, and for a moment the room is full of everyone who ever used those words. That is not decoration. It is the oldest instrument public speech has, and it works because a crowd trusts what it already half-knows. The horror of the unoriginal is a private writer’s disease. A speech made entirely of its author’s own sentences is a speech nobody can join in, and a line that has survived two centuries of repetition has passed a test no new sentence has yet sat.
Text 2 — from an academic essay on rhetoric
Quotation is where thinking goes to stop. The borrowed line arrives with its authority already attached, and the argument that was meant to lead to a conclusion is replaced by a name that is assumed to have reached one. Rarely does anyone check whether the name in fact said it, and more rarely still whether it was true. The habit is worse than lazy: it trains speakers to reach for the ready-made and audiences to accept the familiar as the proven. In a culture that quotes, what survives is not the idea that was most right but the sentence that was most repeatable, and those are seldom the same.
Your answer 0 words
Mark your own against the real criteria:
Both writers agree that a quoted line carries an authority its speaker has not earned; they disagree about whether that is a gift or a fraud.
The first treats quotation as the oldest resource of public speech. A familiar cadence, he argues, fills the room with every previous user of the words, and a crowd trusts what it already half-knows; a line that has survived two centuries has passed a test no new sentence has sat. Originality is a private writer's anxiety, and a speech built only from its author's sentences excludes its audience. The second sees the same borrowed authority as a substitute for reasoning. A quotation ends an argument rather than advancing it, it is seldom checked for accuracy or truth, and the habit trains speaker and listener to mistake the familiar for the proven — so that what a quoting culture remembers is the most repeatable sentence, not the most correct one.
The second essay has the stronger case, though it wins it against a version of the first that the first does not quite make. The handbook describes a speaker's relation to a crowd, not a thinker's relation to a claim, and the two are not the same transaction. Where the second writer is plainly right is in observing that repetition selects for rhythm rather than truth: the first writer's "test" is a test of memorability, and memorability proves nothing.
That said, a public that trusts nothing it has heard before is not a public at all. The defensible position lies between them: quote in order to be joined, never in order to be believed — and check the line first.
The plan.
Every content point must appear.
An opening you can borrow. “Both writers agree that a quoted line carries an authority its speaker has not earned; they disagree about whether that is a gift or a fraud.” — one sentence that names what the texts share and where they split. Borrow the shape, not the words: Both writers agree that X; they disagree about whether Y or Z.
Write an answer to one of the questions below in 280–320 words. Put the number of the question you have chosen at the top of your answer. The genre is not decoration: each of these three is marked on whether it reads like the real thing.
2 (a) · The article. A magazine is running a series called Retired, in which writers nominate one word or phrase that has done its job and should be allowed to rest — a euphemism, a piece of jargon, a compliment that no longer compliments. Write an article nominating your word: what it was for, how it has worn out, and what, if anything, should replace it. Readership: educated, international, not expert. An article may be personal and may use humour; it must not be a list.
2 (b) · The letter. A national magazine has published an article arguing that irony is ruining public conversation: that nobody in Britain can say anything plainly any more, and that the habit of meaning the opposite has become a way of avoiding responsibility. Write a letter to the editor responding to the article. Say how far you agree, give your reasons, and draw on your own experience of British English to support them. A letter to a magazine is formal, addresses the argument rather than the writer, and must make a case.
2 (c) · The report. The organisers of a national public-speaking competition for secondary schools have asked you to write a report on what the judges should reward, after a year in which the judges disagreed badly. Describe the problem, set out the criteria you recommend and how they should be weighted, and say how the criteria should be communicated to competitors. Use headings. A report is impersonal, and every recommendation must be actionable.
Your answer 0 words
Mark your own against the real criteria:
A model answer to Question 2(b), the letter. 305 words.
Dear Editor,
Your correspondent's complaint — that irony has become the national means of not being held to anything — is one I recognised at once, because I have made it myself, and I would like to withdraw about half of it.
The half I keep concerns public life. A minister who answers a question with a raised eyebrow has said nothing, and the eyebrow is not printed the next morning. Irony in that setting is deniability wearing a smile, and your writer is right to call it evasion. Where a speaker owes an answer to people who cannot see his face, the plain sentence is a duty, and I would not defend anyone who dodges it.
The half I withdraw concerns everybody else. In the fifteen years I have lived in Britain, the ironic remark has almost always been the opposite of an escape from responsibility: it has been a way of taking it on. When a colleague described the loss of a contract as "not ideal", she was not hiding from the fact. She was holding it steady, in front of a room that already knew, so that nobody had to watch her be upset. The meaning was entirely available. It was simply not spelled out, because spelling it out would have cost the listeners something.
That, I think, is the distinction the article misses. Irony that trusts the hearer to supply the meaning is a courtesy; irony that relies on the hearer being unable to prove it is a dodge. They use the same tone of voice, and they are opposites.
I would therefore rewrite your writer's conclusion. Irony is not ruining public conversation. Its counterfeit is, and the way to tell the two apart is to ask a single question: could the speaker be quoted?
Yours faithfully,
A reader in Leeds
The plan.
Every content point must appear.
An opening you can borrow. For the letter: “Your correspondent’s complaint — that irony has become the national means of not being held to anything — is one I recognised at once, because I have made it myself, and I would like to withdraw about half of it.” — the claim, the position and the structure of the whole letter in one sentence. For the report: “This report was requested after last year’s judges reached opposite verdicts on the same three speakers, and sets out criteria on which they could have agreed.” For the article: open on the word being used, by a real person, in a real sentence.
Writing marks itself here against the four real Cambridge scales. A task counts as done when the length is right and every criterion is honestly ticked — and on this mock, what counts is the version you wrote after clearing the plan.
If the first draft, written with the plan, ticked every box and the second did not, you know exactly which paragraph the plan was writing for you. That paragraph — usually the evaluation in Part 1, usually the ending in Part 2 — is the one to practise before Mock 2.