Comprehension: Explicit and Implicit Meaning: Question 7
Syllabus R1, R2
Read the following passage, then answer the questions that follow.
Grace had come to her late aunt's cottage with three cardboard boxes and a strict list: kitchen items, clothes for the charity shop, and anything marked with a yellow sticker to keep. The piano, standing under a grey dust sheet in the corner of the front room, wasn't on the list at all.
She lifted the sheet anyway, just to see what was underneath, and found the lid already unlatched, as though someone had opened it recently. Without quite deciding to, she sat down on the stool and rested her fingers on the keys without pressing them, the way she used to before her aunt called her in for tea.
When she finally played, it was only a few notes of an old scale, stumbling and uneven after so many years away from it. She stopped, closed the lid gently, and wrote "piano" in small letters at the very bottom of her yellow-sticker list, underlining it twice.
Her cousin, waiting by the removal van outside, called through the window to ask whether she had found anything worth keeping. "Just some old sheet music," Grace called back, though she left the piano stool pulled out, exactly where she had been sitting.
(a) According to the passage, what three categories did Grace's original list cover? [1]
(b) Explain what Grace resting her fingers on the keys "without pressing them" suggests about her feelings at that moment. [2]
(c) In your own words, explain what the difference between what Grace tells her cousin and what she actually does suggests about her true feelings towards the piano. [2]
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This question pairs a stated fact (part a) with two inference-based tasks built from a character’s small, contradictory actions rather than anything she says directly.
- (a) Explicit retrieval [1]. The three categories are stated directly in the opening sentence; all three are needed for full credit.
- (b) Implicit meaning [2], credit any answer that links the specific gesture (touching without pressing) to a plausible internal state of hesitation or longing, rather than a generic label such as “sad”.
- (c) Own words / implicit meaning [2]. The strongest answers explicitly contrast what Grace says to her cousin with what she actually does, using both as evidence of her real feelings.