Story identified: There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

The story begins by introducing the reader to a computer-controlled house that cooks, cleans, and takes care of virtually every need that a well-to-do United States family could be assumed to have. The reader enters the text on the morning of August 4, 2026, and follows the house through some of the daily tasks that it performs as it prepares its inhabitants for a day of work. At first, it is not apparent that anything is wrong, but eventually it becomes clear that the residents of the house are not present, and that the house is empty. While no direct explanation of the nonexistence of the family is produced, the silhouettes of a man, a woman, two children, and their play ball are described as having been burnt into one side of the house, implying that they were all incinerated by the thermal flash of a nuclear weapon.
_{^{– Plot summary from Wikipedia}}

Confirmed by the contents of the collection of short stories provided in "Additional Information" part of the question, they seem to match the contents of Stories of Ourselves: The University of Cambridge International Examinations Anthology of Stories in English (Cambridge Learning), which contains the following short stories (among many others):

• The Signalman by Charles Dickens
• The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• How It Happened by Arthur Conan Doyle
• There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury
• Meteor by John Wyndham
• The Lemon Orchard by Alex la Guma
• Secrets by Bernard MacLaverty
• The Taste of Watermelon by Borden Deal
• The Third and Final Continent by Jhumpa Lahiri
• On Her Knees by Tim Winton

Story identified: There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

The story begins by introducing the reader to a computer-controlled house that cooks, cleans, and takes care of virtually every need that a well-to-do United States family could be assumed to have. The reader enters the text on the morning of August 4, 2026, and follows the house through some of the daily tasks that it performs as it prepares its inhabitants for a day of work. At first, it is not apparent that anything is wrong, but eventually it becomes clear that the residents of the house are not present, and that the house is empty. While no direct explanation of the nonexistence of the family is produced, the silhouettes of a man, a woman, two children, and their play ball are described as having been burnt into one side of the house, implying that they were all incinerated by the thermal flash of a nuclear weapon.
_{^{– Plot summary from Wikipedia}}

Confirmed by the contents of the collection of short stories provided in "Additional Information" part of the question, they seem to match the contents of Stories of Ourselves: The University of Cambridge International Examinations Anthology of Stories in English (Cambridge Learning), which contains the following short stories (among many others):

• The Signalman, by Charles Dickens
• The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• How It Happened, by Arthur Conan Doyle
• There Will Come Soft Rains, by Ray Bradbury
• Meteor, by John Wyndham
• The Lemon Orchard, by Alex la Guma
• Secrets, by Bernard MacLaverty
• The Taste of Watermelon, by Borden Deal
• The Third and Final Continent, by Jhumpa Lahiri
• On Her Knees, by Tim Winton