Marking three answers to an unseen passage
Candidates answer three questions on this unseen passage:
Rice in the Assam valley is not one crop but a family of practices. The winter boro crop draws on groundwater; the summer sali crop waits for rain. When the monsoon arrives late, farmers who can afford pumps move area to boro, and the water table dips. Extension officers report yields rising for two seasons and then flattening, while diesel costs climb. None of this appears in district averages, which record only area sown and tonnage harvested. Averages, in other words, are a way of not asking who paid.
The questions are: (a) 2 marks, "What does the writer mean by 'averages are a way of not asking who paid'?"; (b) 2 marks, "Explain the link between a late monsoon and a falling water table"; (c) 1 mark, "Find a word in the passage that means the amount produced." Candidate P writes for (a): "It means averages are not accurate." Candidate Q writes for (b): "Farmers who can afford pumps shift area to boro." Candidate R writes for (c): "tonnage".
1. Mark P and Q out of 2 each. State precisely what each answer earns and what is missing, then give your own full-mark answer to (b).
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P - 0/2. The answer substitutes a general complaint about accuracy for the writer's specific claim. The passage does not say averages are wrong; it says they are selective: they record area sown and tonnage harvested and omit diesel cost and groundwater depletion. The phrase "who paid" points to costs borne by identifiable people. A 1-mark answer would at least have said "averages leave out the costs"; P does not reach that.
Q - 1/2. The causal chain is right as far as it goes (pumps, boro, dipping water table), but it does not mention the late monsoon at all, and so does not explain why the shift happens then. It also omits the consequence - that extraction, not rainfall, is what lowers the table.
Full-mark answer to (b): "A late monsoon delays the rain-fed sali crop, so farmers who can afford pumps plant boro instead, and boro draws on groundwater. Extra extraction lowers the water table, which turns a rainfall failure into a water-table problem." The test is whether the answer contains both links - monsoon to crop choice, crop choice to extraction - and one consequence.
2. Mark R's 1-mark answer. Would you also accept "yields"? Justify your decision on both words.
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R - 1/1. "Tonnage harvested" is the passage's own phrase for quantity produced, so "tonnage" is exact.
"Yields" - accept, but as the weaker of the two. Yield is amount produced per unit of area, which is close but not identical to total quantity; the passage uses "yields" in the earlier sentence about rising and flattening. For a 1-mark item with no gloss required, rejecting a word the passage itself uses in that sense would be indefensible at moderation.
Reject: "area sown" (a measure of land, not production), "averages" (the thing being criticised), "practices" (not a quantity).
General rule for this item type: accept any word the passage uses in the required sense, give the mark for the word alone, and do not demand a definition the question did not ask for. If two acceptable words appear, the mark is for finding either, not for finding the better one.
3. From these three scripts, write a single instruction line to candidates (maximum 25 words) on answering inference questions, and explain which script prompted it.
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"Inference answers must say what the writer implies and why: use 'because' and name who does what to whom." (21 words)
The line is prompted mainly by P, whose answer restates the quotation's tone rather than unpacking it; a requirement to supply a "because" clause would have forced P towards the missing content. It also helps Q, whose answer has a chain but drops a link: "because the monsoon is late, farmers with pumps switch to boro" would have exposed the gap to the candidate before the examiner saw it.
What the line deliberately avoids: "read between the lines", "think deeply", "use your own words". Those are attitudes, not operations, and the candidates who need them most cannot act on them. A usable instruction names a syntactic move the candidate can perform under exam pressure.