Component 2: Exploring effects and impact

Text A: from 'The Swimmer' (written for this paper) The water was colder than Maya had expected, cold enough to punch the breath out of her, and for a long moment she simply hung there in the green, arms out, while the shock went through her like a bell. Then she began to swim. The lake was a mile across. Her grandmother had swum it every summer for sixty years, until last summer, when she hadn't, and this summer, when she couldn't. 'Just to the island,' she had said from her bed, her hand light as paper in Maya's. 'Swim to the island for me, and tell me what the water's like.' Maya's arms rose and fell. Her breathing settled into the rhythm she had learned in a chlorinated pool in town, every third stroke, a gasp of sky. Below her the lake went down into darkness. She tried not to think about it. Halfway, she stopped and turned on her back. The shore was a thin line of trees now, the cottage a white speck. The island looked no closer. Her shoulders burned. A heron lifted off from the reeds, slow and grey and enormous, and flapped away over her as if she were not there. She thought: I could turn back. Nobody would know. She thought of her grandmother's hand, light as paper. She turned over and swam on.

Text B: from 'The Ascent' (written for this paper in the style of an early twentieth-century adventure story) By the third day the guides had stopped speaking, and Harrington understood that this was a worse sign than any complaint. The ridge narrowed above them to a blade of ice no wider than a man's boot, with a drop on either side that he did not care to measure. The wind had risen in the night, and now it came over the col in long, howling gusts that threw powdered snow into their faces like flung sand. 'We go on,' said Harrington, though no one had asked him. He had dreamed of this mountain since he was a boy in a draughty schoolroom in Kent, tracing its outline in an atlas with an inky finger. He had told the newspapers he would stand upon its summit by the end of the month. He had told himself a great many things. Behind him, Old Pemba planted his axe and looked up at the cornice that hung over the ridge like a frozen wave. Then he looked at Harrington, and in that look was everything the guides had not said. Harrington set his jaw and took another step.