Multiple choice (longer text)

Every Tuesday after school, seventeen-year-old Nadia Rahman goes to her local library. She isn’t there to study. She runs a free class that helps older people use their smartphones.

The idea came from her grandfather. Last year he was given a new phone, but he kept it in a drawer because he couldn’t work out how to answer video calls. “He was too proud to ask us for help more than once,” Nadia says. “I realised there must be lots of people like him.” She spoke to the librarian, who offered her a room for an hour each week and put up a poster.

Nadia expected four or five people. Twenty-two arrived. “I panicked a bit,” she admits. “I’d prepared a talk, but it was useless because everyone had different phones and different problems.” So she asked two friends from school to come the following week, and they now work with small groups of three or four people.

The students learn useful things: how to make video calls, check the bus timetable online or make the words on their screen bigger. But Nadia says the class has become about more than technology. “Some of them live alone, and Tuesday is the day they talk to people,” she explains. “They stay for tea afterwards and tell us stories about the town fifty years ago.”

Nadia has learned a lot too. “I used to explain things far too quickly. Now I slow down and let people press the buttons themselves, even if it takes longer. If I do it for them, they forget straight away.”

The library has now asked her to start a second class on Saturday mornings. Nadia has agreed, but only if more volunteers can help. “I’ve got exams next year,” she says. “I want the class to be able to continue without me one day.”