Specimen Paper 1 SL

Text 1
From www.finca.org
2012

Jesca Makumbi is a 34-year-old mother who shares her life with her husband and son named Goodluck in Kitunda, Tanzania. Life had been going well for the young couple until 1999, when her mother died, leaving Jesca not only with the pain of losing her, but with the responsibility of raising her three siblings.

Up to that point, Jesca and her husband relied solely on income he received from his job as a meat vendor as well as some support from her mother, which had allowed Jesca to begin to save money so she could purchase a plot of land on which she planned to grow vegetables. But when the couple was suddenly faced with supporting her two sisters and brother, and the added responsibility of paying their school fees, Jesca knew she had to find a way to contribute to the family’s income.

Jesca took her small savings and used it to purchase vegetables, which she sold from the home the family rented. She first learned about FINCA[1] from a neighbor who was a member of FINCA Tanzania’s Valentine Village Banking group. The neighbor encouraged her to take a loan because she was convinced that it would help her change her life by helping her expand her business. Jesca decided to join the group in 2005, and used her first loan of TZS 200,000 or about $130, to buy a variety of vegetables, rent a table at the local market, and pay school fees for her brother and sisters.

Today, Jesca is in her 29th loan cycle with FINCA Tanzania, is still a member of the Valentine Village Banking group, and currently has a loan for TZS 1,500,000 ($950). She’s added another product line to her business – selling chickens – and can now count on a regular roster of clients. She contracts with a wedding planner to provide food for wedding parties, and also supplies vegetables, fruit and chickens to five hotels on a weekly basis.

But according to Jesca, her greatest achievements are that she’s been able to save enough to purchase land and build a house, send all of her siblings through school – her youngest sister is now attending university – and her son is a high-achieving student at the English middle school. “I’m so proud to be part of FINCA family, and I believe without FINCA loans, my family life wouldn’t be the way it is today,” Jesca says. “Every member in my family is proud to be part of FINCA because they cherish our success.”

Text 2
From This Old House
David Sedaris
2007

When it came to decorating her home, my mother was nothing if not practical. She learned early on that children will destroy whatever you put in front of them, so for most of my youth our furniture was chosen for its durability rather than for its beauty. The one exception was the dining-room set, which my parents bought shortly after they were married. Should a guest eye the buffet for longer than a second, my mother would notice and jump in to prompt a compliment. “You like it?” she’d ask. “It’s Scandinavian!” This, we learned, was the name of a region—a cold and forsaken place where people stayed indoors and plotted the death of knobs.                  

The buffet, like the table, was an exercise in elegant simplicity. The set was made of teak, and had been finished with tung oil. This brought out the character of the wood, allowing it, at certain times of day, to practically glow. Nothing was more beautiful than our dining room, especially after my father covered the walls with cork. It wasn’t the kind you use on bulletin boards but something coarse and dark, the color of damp pine mulch. Light the candles beneath the chafing dish, lay the table with the charcoal-textured dinnerware we hardly ever used, and you had yourself a real picture.

This dining room, I liked to think, was what my family was all about. Throughout my childhood, it brought me great pleasure, but then I turned sixteen and decided that I didn’t like it anymore. What happened was a television show, a weekly drama about a close-knit family in Depression-era Virginia. The family didn’t have a blender or a country-club membership, but they did have one another—that and a really great house, an old one, built in the twenties or something. All their bedrooms had slanted clapboard walls and oil lamps that bathed everything in fragile golden light. I wouldn’t have used the word “romantic,” but that’s how I thought of it.

“You think those prewar years were cozy?” my father once asked. “Try getting up at 5 A.M. to sell newspapers on the snow-covered streets. That’s what I did and it stunk to high heaven.”

“Well,” I told him, “I’m just sorry that you weren’t able to appreciate it.”

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn’t live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at. Wasn’t it crushing to live in a house no older than our cat?

“No,” my father said. “Not at all.”

My mother felt the same: “Boxed in by neighbors, having to walk through my parents’ bedroom in order to reach the kitchen. If you think that was fun, you never saw your grandfather with his teeth out.”

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• How does the tone set the mood for this passage and the rest of the text to come?
   
• Judging from this passage, what is the nature of this type of text?