Purpose: Text 1

What does it want you to do? How does it make you do it?

Given that you know this comes from the BBC's Science and Nature website and that its intended audience is people who are interested in environmental issues, what would you guess about the purpose of the article?

Most documents have more than one purpose, but there is generally a main purpose. Put this list in order of importance, with the most important first:

• to entertain
• to give information
• to describe
• to provoke action, eg join a campaign
• to explain
• to analyse

Check to see if you got the order of importance right:

1. To give information: This is the most important aspect of this document because it is showing the reader what they could be doing to help the environment.
2. To provoke action: This is the second most important aspect of this document because it shows that personal action does help the environment and it is suggesting that the more people who join in the better.
3. To entertain: This document has a little humour in it and the interviews with famous environmentalists should prove entertaining to the intended reader.
4. To analyse: This document provides only a tiny bit of analysis that mostly states people’s opinions without analysing them.
5. To explain: There is not much explanation in this document. It assumes the reader already knows quite a lot about the subject; it tells us what environmentalists are doing, but does not offer many reasons why.
6. To describe: There is really no description in this document, so this is the least important aspect of it.