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Paper 1
Answer one question from this Paper.
Answers should be between 500 and 800 words in length.
1. Are we placing too much emphasis on innovation in today’s society?
2. ‘Morality has no place in international politics.’ Discuss.
3. ‘Pop culture is all about appearance.’ Is this a fair comment?
4. To what extent is the commercialisation of sport a positive trend?
5. Would you agree that modern technology addresses our human desires morethan our needs?
6. ‘ Art has little practical value in today’s society.’ What is your view?
7. Have we paid too high a price in our pursuit of economic growth inSingapore?
8. ‘Education in modern society focuses too much on the sciences.’ Discuss.
9.‘Whoever
controls the media controls the world.’ To what extent do youagree?
10. ‘Today’s youth have no regard for authority.’ Discuss this with reference to theyouth in your society.
11. To what extent is raising the retirement age a necessary evil in today’ssociety?
12. Discuss the idea that greed is good.
End of Paper
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Passage 1
1 There used to be a large 1crevasse separating the intimate space of private lifeand what's exposed by the bright lights of fame. But in the Facebook age, thatcrevasse has broadened out into a valley between the realms of privacy andcelebrity, and we are starting to camp out there and get the lay of the land. Whathappens in the valley should not be mistaken for fame. When you sift through thebirthday party pictures of a friend of a friend, you are not mistaking her for LadyGaga. That isn't her 15 minutes of fame. That is your private life colliding with thatof a person you could imagine being friends or colleagues with, but aren't. Call itthe valley of intimate strangers.
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2 The fascinating and troublesome thing about the valley is that the rules ofengagement there are not clearly defined, and it is likely that they will stayundefined. Some of us talk about our relationships online; some allude to themindirectly; some prefer not to discuss them at all. In our house, we have built a set
of improvised rules about how much of family life to make public: I tweet or bloglittle anecdotes about the kids, but do not mention them by name. We never postpictures of them, except to our inner circle of friends on Facebook. When they areold enough for their own Facebook account, we will let them decide forthemselves how public they want to be with their lives.
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3 That's the point, really: these are decisions now. In the old days, life was set bydefault to be private unless you happened to be famous. Now, we have to choosewhether we want to venture into the valley of intimate strangers, and how exactlywe want to live there. That requires a kind of literacy, different from theinformation literacy that educators and media theorists have been talking about
for decades. It requires a literacy in the virtues and perils of both private andpublic domains. It requires that we acknowledge that certain kinds of sharing can,in fact, advance a wider public good, as well as satisfy our own needs forcompassion and counsel.
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4 In our house, we have had health issues that we have chosen not to bring to thepublic sphere of the valley. We have kept them private not because we areembarrassed by them, but because some things we already think about enoughand would frankly rather think less about, and we do not need the extra proddingof 1,000 Facebook friends thinking alongside us. Every revelation sends ripplesout into the world that collide and bounce back in unpredictable ways, and somehuman experiences are simply too intense to let loose in that environment.
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5 But no doubt something is lost in not bringing that part of our lives to the valley.Somewhere in the world there exists another couple that would benefit fromreading a transcript of your lover's quarrel last night, or from watching it live onthe webcam. Even a simple what-I-had-for-breakfast tweet might just steer anearby Twitterer to a good meal. We habitually think of oversharers as egoistsand self-aggrandisers. But what media critic Jarvis rightly points out is that thereis something profoundly selfish in not sharing.
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1 A crevasse is a deep crack in a glacier or levee.
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62 Mark Zuckerberg's prediction that each year we will share twice as muchinformation as the year before is unlikely to hold true in the long run. But there isno doubt that five years from now, when my children are teenagers, they will becomfortable living in public in ways that will astound and alarm their parents. I canalready imagine how powerful the instinct to worry about predators andcompromising photos will be. But it will be our responsibility to keep that instinctin check and to recognize that their increasingly public existence brings morepromise than peril. We have to learn how to break with that most elemental ofparental commandments: Don't talk to strangers. It turns out that strangers havea lot to give us that's worthwhile, and we to them.
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7 Still, talking to strangers is different from handing over a set of your house keys.We are learning how to draw the line between those extremes, and it's a line thateach of us will draw in different ways. That we get to make these decisions forourselves is a step forward; the valley is a much richer and more connected placethan the old divide between privacy and celebrity worship was. But it is going to
take some time to learn how to live there.
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Adapted from “In Praise of Oversharing” by Steven Johnson, Time web edition(20 May 2010)
Passage 2
1 With the social-networking sites of the new century – Friendster and MySpacewere launched in 2003, Facebook in 2004 – the friendship circle has expanded toengulf the whole of the social world, and in so doing, destroyed both its ownnature and that of the individual friendship itself. Facebook's very premise – andpromise – is that it makes our friendship circles visible. There they are, myfriends, all in the same place. Except, of course, they're not in the same place, or,rather, they're not my friends. They're the likeness of my friends, little dehydratedpackets of images and information, no more my friends than a Paris Hilton posteris the celebrity herself.
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2 But surely Facebook has its benefits. Long-lost friends can reconnect, far-flungones can stay in touch. I wonder, though. Having recently moved across thecountry, I thought that Facebook would help me feel connected to the friends Ihad left behind. But now I find the opposite is true. Reading about the mundanedetails of their lives, a steady stream of trivia and ephemera, leaves me feeling
both empty and unpleasantly full, as if I had just binged on junk food, andprecisely because it reminds me of the real sustenance, the real knowledge, weexchange by e-mail or phone or face-to-face. The whole theatrical quality of thebusiness, the sense that my friends are doing their best to impersonatethemselves, only makes it worse. The person I read about, I cannot help feeling,is not quite the person I know.
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2 Mark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook.
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3 As for getting back in touch with old friends – yes, when they're people you reallylove, it's a miracle. But most of the time, they're not. They're someone you knewfor a summer in camp, or a midlevel friend from high school. They don't matter toyou as individuals anymore, certainly not the individuals they are now, they matterbecause they made up the texture of your experience at a certain moment in yourlife, in conjunction with all the other people you knew. Tear them out of thattexture – read about their brats, look at pictures of their vacation – and they meannothing. Tear out enough of them and you ruin the texture itself, replace a matrixof feeling and memory, the deep subsoil of experience, with a spurious sense offamiliarity. Your 18-year-old self knows them. Your 40-year-old self should notknow them.
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4 Finally, the new social networking sites have falsified our understanding ofintimacy itself, and with it, our understanding of ourselves. First, that intimacy isconfessional – an idea both peculiarly American and peculiarly young, perhapsbecause both types of people tend to travel among strangers, and so believe inthe instant disgorging of the self as the quickest route to familiarity. Second, that
identity is reducible to information: the name of your cat, your favourite AmericanIdol contestant, the stupid thing you did in high school. Third, that it is reducible, inparticular, to the kind of information that social networking sites are mostinterested in eliciting, consumer preferences. Forget that we're all conductingmarket research on ourselves. Far worse is that Facebook amplifies ourlongstanding tendency to see ourselves in just those terms.
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5 So information replaces experience, as it has throughout our culture. But when Ithink about my friends, what makes them who they are, and why I love them, it isnot the names of their siblings that come to mind, or their fear of spiders. It is theirqualities of character. This one's emotional generosity, that one's moralseriousness, the dark humour of a third. Yet even those are just descriptions, and
no more specify the individuals uniquely than to say that one has red hair, anotheris tall. To understand what they really look like, you would have to see a picture.To understand who they really are, you would have to hear about the thingsthey've done. Character, revealed through action: the two eternal elements ofnarrative. In order to know people, you have to listen to their stories. But that isprecisely what the Facebook page does not leave room for, or 500 friends, timefor.
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Adapted from “Faux Friendship” by William Deresiewicz, The Chronicle of HigherEducation (6 December 2009)
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Read the passages in the insert and then answer al l the questions which follow. Note thatup to fifteen marks will be given for the quality and accuracy of your use of Englishthroughout this Paper.
NOTE: When a question asks for an answer IN YOUR OWN WORDS AS FAR ASPOSSIBLE and you select the appropriate material from the passages for your answer, youmust use your own words to express it. Little credit can be given to answers which onlycopy words or phrases from the passages.
Questions on Passage 1
1. Explain the irony in the phrase ‘intimate strangers’ (line 9).
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2. The author mentions a ‘different’ kind of literacy needed today (lines 22 – 23). Whatdoes this new literacy require? Use your own words as far possible.
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3. Using your own words as far as possible, explain what the author means when hesays that ‘Every revelation sends ripples out into the world that collide and bounceback in unpredictable ways’ (lines 32 – 33).
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In paragraph 6, what adjustments does the author think parents of teenagers have tomake in the age of social networking? Use your own words as far as possible.
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What is the difference implied between ‘talking to strangers’ and ‘handing over a set ofyour house keys’ (line 52)?
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Questions on Passage 2
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6. Using your own words as far as possible, explain why the author feels ‘both emptyand unpleasantly full’ when he reads about other people’s lives on Facebook (lines 14- 15).
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7. What point is the author making in the last sentence of paragraph 5?
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8. Using material from paragraphs 3 to 4, summarise why the author thinks interactingwith others on social networking sites is unfulfilling, and the negative impact of usingsuch sites.
Write your summary in no more than 120 words, not counting the opening words whichare printed below. Use your own words as far as possible.
While social networking sites may seem to allow us to stay connected with old
friends,...…………………………………………………………………………………………
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9. Questions on Passages 1 and 2
Give the meaning of the following words as they are used in the passage. Write youranswer in one word or a short phrase.
From Passage 1
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From Passage 2
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(e) far-flung (line 10) ………………………………..……………………………
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10. The authors provide two different perspectives on the social networking phenomenon.Johnson sees it in a favourable light, whereas Deresiewicz is critical of it.
Which of the two writers’ views do you think more accurately reflects the situation inyour society? Support your answer with reference to both passages as well asknowledge of your society.
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