What do you learn about the writer's return in lines 01 to 12?

This question tests reading for information (R1). The examiner wants to know whether you can gather what lines 01 to 12 actually tell you about the return, and then say what those facts add up to. The mark scheme has two tiers, and the gap between them is inference, not quantity.

The retrievable detail [1 to 3]

• The writer climbs the sea wall as the tide is on the turn (line 01).
• Twenty years have passed since he last stood there, and he was a boy then, with cold hands and a shrimping net (lines 02 to 03).
• The old landing stage has gone, leaving only a few blackened posts leaning at odd angles, the planks carried off by winter storms (lines 10 to 12).

A response that stops here, however neatly it is written, sits at 3 marks. Listing is a retrieval skill, and the question asks what you learn.

Reaching 4 to 5 marks

1. The return is measured against a remembered childhood. He does not simply arrive, he arrives again (line 02), and the boy with the shrimping net is the standard the adult is checking the place against. [1]
2. The place is simultaneously unchanged and altered. Line 04 states both at once: 'Nothing about the path had changed, and yet everything about it had.' You should quote this, because it is the sentence that makes the paragraph a paradox rather than a description. [1]
3. Part of the change is in him, not in the marsh. The wall 'felt narrower, as though the years had worn a groove no wider than my own footsteps' (lines 06 to 07). A wall does not narrow; a body grows. The simile hands you the inference that the returning adult is the variable. [1]

Where marks are lost

Two habits cap this answer. The first is retelling the lines in order instead of grouping them, which produces a paraphrase rather than an account of what has been learned. The second is drifting outside the stated boundary; the grandfather, the egret and the erosion maps all belong to later questions, and detail taken from beyond line 12 earns nothing here however accurate it is.

Examination takeaway

On a five-mark 'what do you learn' question, plan three grouped points rather than six scattered ones, and make sure at least one of them states something the passage implies but never says outright.