Moderating an Inference Item on a Village Bus Shelter
At a moderation meeting for Class X reading comprehension, a team is reviewing a 2-mark inference question based on this unseen passage: 'For three years, the 6:40 a.m. bus from Kheri stopped at a bare pole. In June, the village council built a shelter with a tin roof, a bench, a solar lamp and a timetable board. By October, average daily boardings had risen from 31 to 44. The council declared the shelter a success. A student survey, however, found that only four of the 44 daily passengers were women; most women said they still walked to the highway because the 6:40 was unreliable after dark. The survey also recorded that the timetable board was accurate on only nine days out of thirty. The council chairperson called the findings a modest correction, not a failure.' The question asks: 'What does the passage suggest about the shelter's success?' Candidate A writes: 'The shelter caused a 42% rise in ridership, so it was a complete success.' Candidate B writes: 'The shelter helped some passengers, but it did not make the bus usable for women after dark.' A marker wants to award full marks to A because the percentage is correct.
1. Which candidate answer should receive full marks, and what two errors in the other answer must be named in the marking note?
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Candidate B should receive full marks.
Candidate A's arithmetic is right: 44 - 31 = 13, and 13/31 is about 42%. But an inference question asks what the passage suggests, not whether a number is correct.
Two errors in A:
- Causal overreach. 'Caused' claims that the shelter alone produced the rise. The passage gives no comparison period, no control group and no check on fares, season or road conditions.
- Unsupported absolute. 'Complete success' is contradicted by the survey: only 4 of 44 passengers were women, most women found the 6:40 unreliable after dark, and the timetable was accurate on only 9 of 30 days.
B is defensible because it keeps both halves of the evidence: some benefit (ridership rose) and a real limit (women still avoided the bus after dark). The marking note should say: credit qualified inference; do not credit a correct statistic used to support an absolute judgement.
2. Marker A argues that 'modest' means 'small', so the chairperson admitted failure. Write a 60-80 word explanation that settles the vocabulary question using context.
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In this sentence, 'modest' modifies 'correction', not 'failure'. The chairperson sets the survey against the claim of success and says, in effect, 'this is a limited correction, not a failure'. That contrast makes 'modest' mean not boastful or limited in claim, not small in size. If 'modest' meant simply 'small', the phrase 'not a failure' would be redundant. The context supports a tone of qualified defence, not an admission of failure.
3. Design a 1-mark vocabulary question and a 2-mark inference question from the passage, and state the acceptable answer for each.
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1-mark vocabulary question: 'The timetable board was accurate on only nine days out of thirty.' What does accurate mean here? Acceptable answer: correct or true to the actual bus times; not misleading.
2-mark inference question: Why did most women continue to walk to the highway instead of using the 6:40 bus? Acceptable answer: They judged the bus unreliable after dark (1 mark). The new shelter did not solve their safety or timing problem, so the council's 'success' was partial (1 mark).
Award the inference marks only if the answer links the women's decision to evidence in the passage, not to a general opinion about village transport.