Marking inference: 'a museum nobody visited' in a 3-mark reading question
During a 2-hour English paper (coefficient 3, 28 candidates), the reading passage is a 300-word narrative: a narrator returns to a fishing village after twenty years. The text says: 'The harbour wall was still there. The boats were not. My father's nets, folded on the sill, had become a museum nobody visited.' Question 4, worth 3 marks, asks: 'What does the writer suggest by a museum nobody visited?' Three scripts are sampled. A writes: 'The nets are old and kept in a museum.' B writes: 'The father's work is preserved but no longer used or remembered,' and quotes 'folded on the sill'. C writes: 'The writer does not like museums.' The marking scheme awards 1 mark for literal meaning and 2 for inference. The team leader asks how to apply it consistently.
1. Justify the mark for each script (A, B, C) using the 1 + 2 scheme.
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Script A: 1/3. It gives the literal idea of preservation ('old', 'kept'), which earns the first mark, but it stops there. It does not explain the negative implication of 'nobody visited'. The word 'museum' is treated as a real place rather than as a metaphor for something preserved but no longer alive.
Script B: 3/3. It gives the literal sense ('preserved') and the inference ('no longer used or remembered'). The quotation 'folded on the sill' supports the idea of something left in place, untouched. The answer also connects the nets to the father's work, which is the implied subject of the metaphor.
Script C: 0/3. It reacts to the word 'museum' in isolation and ignores the passage. It is an opinion, not a reading of the text.
The scheme is consistent if the first mark is for lexical/literal understanding and the two remaining marks require an inferred contrast between preservation and neglect.
2. Explain how the two sentences 'The harbour wall was still there. The boats were not.' support B's inference.
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The two sentences form a contrast. 'Still there' asserts continuity of the harbour wall, a fixed object; 'were not' denies the presence of the boats, which represent activity, work and life. The parallel structure makes the negation more visible: what remains is the setting, not the practice.
This prepares the metaphor of the nets as a museum exhibit: the nets are preserved like objects in a display case, but the life that gave them meaning has gone. B's phrase 'no longer used' is therefore grounded in the contrast between the wall and the boats, while 'remembered' is supported by 'nobody visited'. A strong answer quotes or refers to both parts of the contrast rather than to the museum image alone.
3. A candidate argues that 'still' proves continuity. How would you respond in five lines of feedback?
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You are right that 'still' marks continuity, but check what continues: it is the harbour wall, not the fishing life. The next sentence, 'The boats were not', cancels the continuity at the level of activity. The writer is contrasting a surviving place with a vanished practice, and that contrast is what makes the nets look like an exhibit. So 'still' should be read as part of an antithesis, not as proof that nothing has changed. To gain the inference marks, connect 'still' to what has disappeared.