What do you learn about the writer's feelings from the whole passage?

This is the whole-text question, and it tests three reading strands at once: retrieving information, collating it across the passage, and inferring from it (R1, R2, R3). The examiner is measuring range and synthesis, so evidence drawn from one part of the passage cannot reach the top band however well it is handled.

1 to 3 marks: isolated detail

One feeling supported from one place, for instance that the writer is sad about the landing stage.

4 to 7 marks: collating across the passage

Track the emotional line through the whole piece and name each stage with its evidence:

8 to 10 marks: synthesis and inference

The top band wants what the sequence adds up to. The writer arrives intending to test the marsh against memory, and leaves having revised the purpose of the visit: 'I had not come back to find the marsh unchanged, whatever I might once have told myself on the drive down. I had come back to be reminded that change here was not loss in the way it is elsewhere' (lines 74 to 77). The phrase 'whatever I might once have told myself' admits self-deception, so the passage records a correction rather than a mood.

The sharpest inference available is at lines 67 to 70. The heron waits 'with the kind of patience that no longer felt available to people my age'. Nothing has been said about the heron's feelings; the sentence is entirely about the watcher. At that moment the visit turns into a judgement on himself rather than on the shore, and the marsh's indifference, established with the oystercatchers earlier, becomes the standard he is failing to meet. An answer that reads that line as evidence about the writer, not about the bird, is working at 9 or 10.

Examination takeaway

For a whole-passage feelings question, quote from at least four separated places and finish with the change in the writer, not the last feeling in the text.