Reach for the Top

This chapter is not a story with invented characters. It is a pair of life sketches, printed one after the other in the same chapter: Part I on the mountaineer Santosh Yadav and Part II on the tennis player Maria Sharapova. The two women have nothing to do with each other, so the first job while reading is to keep the two accounts firmly apart in your mind. A village in Haryana, a fight for schooling and an Everest expedition belong to Part I. A tennis academy in the United States, a two-year separation from a mother and a world ranking belong to Part II. Moving a detail across turns a correct answer into a wrong one.

Why place the two together at all? Because the lives answer the same question from opposite ends of the world: what does it actually take to reach the top of something difficult? Both women got there very young. Both had to leave home to do it. Both met an obstacle that had nothing to do with talent. For Santosh it was a custom that quietly decided what a girl in her family could and could not do. For Maria it was distance, loneliness and being the smallest, youngest outsider in a hard training set-up. Neither obstacle could be removed by being good at the sport; each one had to be outlasted.

The writing is different in the two parts, and noticing that will help you with style questions. Part I moves steadily forward in time and lets Santosh's actions carry the meaning, with her own comments dropped in here and there. Part II leans much more heavily on Maria's own words, so we hear her flat, unsentimental tone directly, and the textbook also sets out a short personal profile of her, placing small everyday facts beside an enormous professional achievement. That contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary is part of the point. Nothing in either woman's starting position guaranteed the ending, which is exactly why the endings are worth studying.

Santosh Yadav was born in a village of the Rewari district in Haryana. She was the sixth child in her family and the first daughter, arriving after five sons. The chapter is honest about what that meant. In the society she was born into, the birth of a son was treated as a blessing and the birth of a daughter was not welcomed in the same way. Even the name she was given points at it: Santosh means contentment, a quiet suggestion that a girl should be satisfied with whatever she is given rather than ask for more. Her whole life reads like a polite, stubborn refusal of that suggestion.

Money was never the problem. Her family were prosperous landowners who could afford good schooling, and the sons of the house were sent away to study, including as far as the capital. Custom, not poverty, decided that Santosh would make do with the small village school. This is worth underlining whenever you write about her, because it changes the shape of the answer: the barrier in her way was an idea, and ideas are much harder to argue with than bills.

She began pushing back early and in small ways. Where the girls around her wore traditional dress, she wore shorts, and she showed no enthusiasm for the future that had already been sketched out for her. The real test came at sixteen, when her family began to think about her marriage. She did not create a scene; she made a bargain. She told her parents plainly that she wanted to study further, and that if they would not educate her properly she would not marry at all. That won the argument about marriage, but not yet the money. She got herself admitted to a school away from the village, and when her parents refused to pay the fees she told them, quite calmly, that she would work part-time and earn the fees herself. At that point they gave in and paid, and her schooling went on.

From school she went on to college, enrolling at Maharani College in Jaipur, where she lived in a hostel. Her room looked out towards the Aravalli hills, and from her window she could watch villagers making their way up the slope and disappearing over the top. Most students would have seen scenery there. Santosh saw a question: where are they going, and can I go too?

One day Santosh climbed the Aravalli slope herself and found a group of mountaineers at the top. She asked what they were doing, and they told her about climbing. When she asked whether she could join them, they did not laugh at her; they said yes and encouraged her to take up climbing. Two things in that exchange are worth noticing. She went up to find out for herself instead of admiring from a distance, and she asked to be included instead of waiting to be invited. Almost everything she achieved later grows out of those two habits.

Training meant a course at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering at Uttarkashi, and that meant money and, in a family like hers, permission. She handled both herself. She saved up the money, and when her college term ended so late that going home first would have made her miss the start of the course, she went straight to the institute and enrolled without asking her father at all. She wrote to him afterwards to apologise for having joined without his permission. Get this detail the right way round when you write about her: nobody arranged the training for her, and nobody was asked to pay for it. She arranged it, and then explained herself.

What carried her on the mountain was ordinary discipline applied without gaps: physical fitness, patience with dull routine, a willingness to be uncomfortable for weeks at a time, and steadiness when things went wrong. On the 1992 Everest expedition she also showed the quality that mountaineering values most highly. High on the mountain she found a climber, Mohan Singh, in serious difficulty, and she shared her own oxygen supply with him; he survived. Oxygen at that height is not a spare item you hand over lightly. Giving it away is a decision about the kind of climber you intend to be.

In 1992, at the age of twenty, she stood on the summit of Everest, and the chapter records that at the time no woman anywhere had reached it younger. About a year later she climbed it again, with an Indo-Nepalese women's expedition, becoming the only woman then to have scaled Everest twice. The government honoured her with the Padmashri. She also brought down a large load of rubbish left on the Himalayan slopes by earlier expeditions, some five hundred kilograms of it, which tells you she thought of the mountain as something to be looked after rather than conquered and abandoned.

Part II begins a completely different life. Maria Sharapova was born in Russia in 1987, and on 22 August 2005 she became the number one woman tennis player in the world. She was eighteen. By then she had already won the Wimbledon singles title, in 2004, at seventeen. Those are the headline facts and the profile states them plainly. What the writing is really interested in, though, is the distance between those facts and the child who made them possible.

She was about nine years old when she was taken to the United States to train, at a tennis academy in Florida. The move was not an adventure holiday. Her father took whatever work he could find so that the coaching fees kept being paid, which meant that he was rarely free to be with her. Her mother could not travel with them at all: visa rules kept her in Russia for about two years, so a young child spent those years on the other side of the world from her mother. Read that again before writing about the success. The price was being paid at nine, long before there was any prize.

The tennis itself came quickly once she was allowed to compete. She turned professional while still a teenager and her rise from there was fast. But the profile does not present her as a lucky child prodigy who was handed a career. It shows a competitor: someone unfailingly polite off the court and entirely unsentimental on it, who says openly that she wants to be the best and does not pretend to be indifferent to what winning brings her, money included.

She is equally firm about who she is. Although she was brought up and trained in the United States from childhood, she describes herself as Russian and says she would play for Russia if she were picked for the Olympics. For a student writing about identity, that is a useful point to make: the country that made her a player did not become the country she felt she belonged to. Training changed her game, not her sense of home.

The best remembered part of this profile has nothing to do with tennis. It is about a nine-year-old at a training academy, far from home, who was the youngest player there and was treated accordingly. The older girls decided she had no business being among them, and made sure she felt it. Because she was so young her day ended much earlier than theirs; they came in late at night, woke her from her sleep and ordered her to clean up the room. Being humiliated by people she could not get away from, in the one place she had to live, is the detail to hold on to.

What matters for your answer is what she did with that. She did not go home, she did not complain her way out of the academy, and she did not try to win the older girls over. She decided instead to become harder to push. The loneliness went into the training. In her own account of those years the idea that keeps returning is not sadness but toughness; she treats the whole miserable stretch as the thing that made her, which is why a question about her character should be answered with this period and not with a trophy list.

Notice how differently the two parts handle hardship. Santosh's hardship came before she found her sport, and once she was climbing, the difficulty was a mountain she had chosen. Maria's hardship came inside the very training that was supposed to be her opportunity. There was no villain to argue with, no custom to defeat, only distance, homesickness and a pecking order among children.

This is also where the chapter earns its honesty. It could easily have told two clean success stories with the difficult parts left out. Instead it shows a family split across continents, a father doing unglamorous work to keep the lessons going, and a child growing up for two years without her mother nearby. When a question asks what her success cost, these are the facts to use. A general sentence about hard work is not an answer; a nine-year-old cleaning up after older girls at night is.

Set the two lives beside each other and the pattern shows up quickly. Both women reached the top of an extremely demanding field while still very young. Both had to leave home to do it. Family, though, worked very differently in the two lives, and that is worth a sentence of its own. Maria's father took her across the world and then worked at whatever jobs he could find to keep her on court, while her mother was left behind for about two years. Santosh had to win her family round step by step, and when it came to her mountaineering course she saved the money herself and enrolled without waiting for her father's permission. And both, in their own way, refused to be defined by the place they had come from.

The differences are just as useful in an answer. Santosh's obstacle was social. Nothing physical prevented her from studying; a custom did, and she had to argue her way past her own family before she could even begin. Maria's obstacle was personal and geographical: separation, homesickness and unkindness in a place where she knew nobody. Their fields differ too. Mountaineering is not a career in the ordinary sense; it offers danger, teamwork and no prize money, and Santosh's clean-up of the slopes shows she thought about what she owed the mountain. Professional tennis has rankings, contracts and constant public attention, and Maria is direct about wanting the rewards it brings.

The writing differs as well. Part I keeps more distance and lets events carry the meaning, quoting Santosh only occasionally. Part II works the other way, letting Maria speak so that her own blunt tone becomes part of the evidence. When a question asks how the two parts are alike or different, you can write about style as well as about content, which makes the comparison fuller.

Finally, the title holds the two halves together. One woman literally reached a top, the highest point on earth, and did it twice. The other reached a top that exists only on a list, the number one position in world tennis. The chapter is quietly arguing that these are the same kind of climb: a long and unglamorous preparation, a private cost that nobody photographs, and then one day that everybody hears about.

Begin every answer by making clear which half of the chapter you are in. A sentence that opens with In Part I, Santosh Yadav or In Part II, Maria Sharapova costs nothing and keeps a Part I detail from wandering into a Part II answer. Everest, the Aravalli hills, the village school and the rubbish carried down the slopes belong only to Santosh. The Florida academy, the visa, the older girls and the world ranking belong only to Maria.

For a character sketch, three qualities are enough, but each one needs an incident attached to it. Determination on its own is only a word; determination plus the bargain Santosh struck with her parents at sixteen is an answer. Do the same for Maria: resilience plus the fact that she met bullying with harder practice instead of complaint. If you cannot name the incident, drop the quality and choose one you can support.

For a long answer, use three moves in this order: the quality, the incident, and what it shows. Keep the incident short and factual, and spend the last line on meaning rather than on retelling. If a question asks whether the price of success was worth paying, you are allowed to disagree with the chapter, provided you argue from what actually happens in it, such as the two years without a mother or the years of training before any summit.

Be careful with quotations. Use inverted commas only when you are certain of the exact words; otherwise report what was said in your own sentence. A neat paraphrase never loses anything, while a wrong quotation is simply wrong. Keep the writer and the speaker apart as well: when the profile tells us Maria's ranking or Santosh's climbing dates, that is the writer reporting; when Maria calls herself Russian, those are her words being reported.

Vocabulary that fits this chapter well includes determination, perseverance, resilience, sacrifice, self-reliance, discipline, ambition, humility and gender bias. Use each one where it is attached to an incident, not as decoration at the end of a paragraph. An answer built from three clear facts will always read better than one built from ten admiring adjectives.