Answer: Model: The grandfather moves through the orchard 'touching each trunk', as if 'taking a roll call of the living', an image that turns his routine into an act of care and quiet hope.

Answer: Model: 'their branches bare and black ... a sky the colour of dishwater'. (Any version that omits words from the middle, marks the omission with an ellipsis and keeps the meaning is acceptable.)

Answer: Model: The trees '[stand] in their rows like a choir that had forgotten the words'.

Answer: Model: The narrator reflects that it 'took [them] years to understand' the grandfather's meaning, suggesting that some wisdom can only be recognised with age.

Answer: (1) 'you' should be capitalised: the original is 'You'. (2) 'sleeping' should be 'asleep': the original is 'because they're asleep'. The quotation must match the text exactly.

Answer: The quoted words are accurate, but the quotation alone loses the narrator's original doubt: the full sentence says the fourteen-year-old was 'certain' this was 'the kind of thing old people said to make the world sound kinder than it was'. Without 'than it was', the sense of disbelief disappears, so the student should quote enough to keep that meaning.

Answer: It personifies the orchard as if it had been putting on a brave face and can no longer hide its decline. 'Pretending' implies that any earlier signs of life were a performance, which makes the bareness of winter seem like an honest admission of loss.

Answer: 'Dishwater' suggests a dull grey-brown that is murky, used and slightly unpleasant. Its ordinary, domestic connotations make the sky feel drab and lifeless rather than dramatic, matching the orchard's exhausted mood.

Answer: 'Roll call' suggests counting people present, as in a classroom or among soldiers, so it humanises the trees. 'Of the living' raises the stakes: it implies some trees may have died and that the grandfather is anxiously confirming who has survived. The phrase turns a routine walk into an act of care and fear.

Answer: He may have been describing people, perhaps someone ill, grieving or withdrawn, or his own ageing: those who seem dormant are still worth visiting. Earlier word choices ('sleeping', 'visiting someone', 'roll call of the living') already describe the trees as if they were people, so the ending makes that hidden meaning explicit.

Model answer: The writer presents the grandfather as someone who refuses to accept the orchard's apparent death, treating the trees with the patience and tenderness owed to people. Where the narrator sees trees that have 'given up pretending', standing 'like a choir that had forgotten the words', the grandfather walks among them 'every morning anyway', and the adverb 'anyway' quietly marks his defiance of the evidence. His routine of 'touching each trunk ... as though he were taking a roll call of the living' is significant, as 'roll call' personifies the trees as a group to be accounted for, while 'of the living' hints at his fear that some may not have survived. The detail of the 'pruning shears in his coat pocket that he never took out' suggests readiness for a future spring that has not yet come, a symbol of faith rather than action. His explanation, that the trees '[are] only sleeping', reframes winter as rest rather than death, and the gentle logic of 'You don't stop visiting someone because they're asleep' extends this personification into a moral principle. The narrator's later realisation that he 'was not describing the trees at all' invites readers to reread the orchard as a metaphor for people in decline. Through this sustained personification, the writer suggests that the grandfather's view is an act of loyalty and hope, one the narrator could only understand with time.