Component 1: Communicating information and ideas

Text A: from a newspaper feature about urban foxes (2025, written for this paper) At 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, in a car park behind a supermarket in south London, I am sitting in the dark with a flask of tea and a wildlife photographer called Dev, waiting for a fox. 'They're creatures of habit,' Dev whispers. 'She'll come along that wall, check the bins, then cross to the railway line.' Twenty minutes later she does exactly that: a slim vixen, rust-red under the orange streetlight, trotting along the top of the wall as neatly as a cat. She pauses, looks straight at us with an expression of mild contempt, and is gone. Britain has an estimated 150,000 urban foxes, and they divide opinion like few other animals. To some, they are a thrilling scrap of wildness in the concrete. To others, they are pests that rip open bin bags, dig up lawns and scream in the night like murder victims. Councils receive thousands of complaints a year. The truth, says Dev, is that foxes have simply adapted faster than we have. 'We built cities full of food and shelter, and then we're surprised something moved in.'

Text B: from a Victorian naturalist's notebook (written for this paper in the style of the period) March 14th. — Walked out at dusk to the old quarry on the common, where Thomas the gamekeeper assured me a vixen had made her earth among the fallen stones. He spoke of her with the bitterest enmity, she having carried off, by his reckoning, no fewer than eleven of his master's pheasants since Michaelmas. I concealed myself behind a thorn and waited the better part of an hour, growing very cold. At length she appeared — a lean, handsome creature, her brush tipped with white, who stood upon a stone and surveyed the country with an air of entire possession, as though the common, the quarry and the gamekeeper himself were all her property. I confess I could not share Thomas's hatred. There is something in the fox — her cunning, her boldness, her perfect fitness for the life she leads — which commands a kind of admiration even from those she robs. I resolved to say nothing of the earth to Thomas, and walked home through the dark well pleased with my evening.