Paper 2 Directed Writing (Formal letter) 0500/23 May/June 2022

 Question 1

 

The headteacher of your child’s school is considering setting up a repair café run by volunteers in the school; the headteacher has asked for opinions from parents.

 

Write a letter to the headteacher giving your views as a parent.

 

In your letter you should:

 

• evaluate the ideas, attitudes and opinions given in the two texts

• give your views about whether or not a repair café is a good idea for students, staff and the wider community.

 

Base your article on what you have read in Address both of the bullet points.

 

Write about 250 to 350 words.

both texts, but be careful to use your own words.

 

Up to 15 marks are available for the content of your answer, and up to 25 marks for the quality of your writing.

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Texts

 

Text A: Permission to play: let’s make fixing things cool again

 

This text is about encouraging people to repair their broken belongings.

 

Yellowed kitchen appliances, dust-streaked radios, unresponsive DVD players: the table was strewn with stuff that even a junk shop’s discounts couldn’t make enticing. Most of the electronics were broken and all of them had outlived their usefulness. Maybe our grandparents would have had a go at fixing objects but the number of children that day, screwdrivers in hand, who crowded

the table just to get a look inside this stuff, made me hope we could revive old skills. 5

The participants of the event were a little different from those I usually cater for at iFixit, a free online repair guide for everything from cracked mobile phones to oil changes for your car. My company’s mission is to teach as many people as possible how to fix the stuff they own, kids included.

And kids were just as eager to learn as we were to teach them. The venue was crowded and  10

noisy, but once they pried up the hood of a device, the world faded as pint-sized tech explorers were let loose on intricate circuit boards and motors. One teenager spent two hours working on an obsolete video player. It was amazing to watch the old relic whirr back to life.

Kids are born tinkerers: they like to fiddle with contraptions, experiment with ‘What happens if…?’

All they need is someone to put a device in one hand, a screwdriver in the other, and ask, ‘Do 15

you want to take this apart?’ and their eyes go wide with astonishment. After all, their parents have been telling them not to take things apart their entire lives.

As adults, we enjoy our toys and gadgets too, though ours are more expensive so we keep younger hands away. Give kids something to take apart and their faces light up with excitement.

Give adults the same device, and intimidation clouds their faces. That fear comes from a lifetime 20

of feeling like electronics are beyond us and we’re not qualified to tackle them. There are all kinds of pressures on us to replace rather than fix.

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Text B: The following text is about the ‘repair shop cafe’ movement.

A vacuum cleaner, two laptops, an e-reader, a washing machine, hair clippers, three chairs, a pair of jeans, and a remote-control helicopter. All broken.

It sounds like a pile of things that you’d stick in boxes and take to the rubbish tip. In fact, it’s a list of things mended in a single afternoon by eager volunteers in just one of the many repair shop cafes springing up.

 

This repair cafe is part of a burgeoning international network aimed at confronting a world of ‘stuff’, of fridges and dishwashers littering dumps in countries far from where they were bought and the rubbish swilling through the oceans. There are now even TV programmes showing how treasured objects are restored and fixed.

 

The hair clippers belong to William, who describes himself as ‘mechanically incompetent’. He sits down at the table of Christine who volunteers at the cafe, where people can bring household items to be fixed for free. In less than five minutes, Christine, a librarian, has unscrewed and removed the blades, cleaned inside the machine, oiled the blades, and screwed it all back together.

 

Today, the repairers will divert 24 kg of waste from going to landfill. Some items can’t be fixed on the spot but very little needs to be thrown away.

 

Some volunteers are drawn to repair cafes to combat this ‘throwaway culture’. The average lifespan for a piece of clothing in many countries is 3.3 years. In some countries it’s less than that.

 

Manufacturers design products to break down after a certain amount of time, and make them difficult or expensive to fix. One repair cafe volunteer, Stuart Ward, explains, ‘Fixing items is actively discouraged by many manufacturers. We believe in the right to repair. You own your equipment; you should be allowed to take a screwdriver to it and play with it.’

 

‘Some repair cafes do the repair in front of the customer, not out in the back, not hidden,’ says the lead IT technician in one repair cafe. ‘It’s a matter of confidence, not magic. Someone put it

together, someone can take it apart.’