Comprehension: Explicit and Implicit Meaning: Question 2

Read the following passage, then answer the questions that follow.

The harbour at Bellcross had once been loud enough to wake the gulls before dawn, engines coughing to life, crates thudding onto the quay, men calling prices to each other across the water. Now, when sixteen-year-old Nadia visited her grandfather each summer, the loudest sound was the creak of rope against a mooring post.

Only three boats remained where forty had once been tied. Her grandfather's, the Merry Kestrel, sat lowest in the water, its blue paint sun-bleached to the colour of old bruises. He still rose before dawn out of habit, though most mornings he returned by nine with a bucket barely covering its base.

"The fish haven't gone anywhere," he told her, coiling a rope with hands that no longer moved quite as quickly as the knot required. "It's the quotas. The big boats from the mainland take what used to be ours before we've even left the harbour." He said this without bitterness, in the flat voice of a man reciting a fact he had repeated many times before, to himself as much as to anyone listening.

Nadia noticed that he had stopped mending the second net that hung, half-repaired, in the shed. The net he used to say he was saving "for when trade picks up again." It still hung there, needle threaded, exactly as it had the summer before. She did not ask him about it. Some questions, she was learning, were kinder left alone.

(a) According to the passage, how many boats are moored in the harbour now, and how many were there before? [2]

(b) Explain what the detail of the half-repaired net "hanging... exactly as it had the summer before" suggests about the grandfather's feelings about the future of his trade. [3]

(c) In your own words, explain why Nadia decides not to ask her grandfather about the net. [3]