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 todays 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 more

than our needs?

6. Art has little practical value in todays society. What is your view? 7. Have we paid too high a price in our pursuit of economic growth in

Singapore?
8. Education in modern society focuses too much on the sciences. Discuss . 9. Whoever controls the media controls the world. To what extent do you

agree?
10. Todays youth have no regard for authority. Discuss this with reference to the

youth in your society.

11. To what extent is raising the retirement age a necessary evil in todays

society?
12. Discuss the idea that greed is good.

End of Paper

Passage 1 There used to be a large 1crevasse separating the intimate space of private life and what's exposed by the bright lights of fame. But in the Facebook age, that crevasse has broadened out into a valley between the realms of privacy and celebrity, and we are starting to camp out there and get the lay of the land. What happens in the valley should not be mistaken for fame. When you sift through the 5 birthday party pictures of a friend of a friend, you are not mistaking her for Lady Gaga. That isn't her 15 minutes of fame. That is your private life colliding with that of a person you could imagine being friends or colleagues with, but aren't. Call it the valley of intimate strangers. The fascinating and troublesome thing about the valley is that the rules of 10 engagement there are not clearly defined, and it is likely that they will stay undefined. Some of us talk about our relationships online; some allude to them indirectly; 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 blog little anecdotes about the kids, but do not mention them by name. We never post 15 pictures of them, except to our inner circle of friends on Facebook. When they are old enough for their own Facebook account, we will let them decide for themselves how public they want to be with their lives. That's the point, really: these are decisions now. In the old days, life was set by default to be private unless you happened to be famous. Now, we have to choose 20 whether we want to venture into the valley of intimate strangers, and how exactly we want to live there. That requires a kind of literacy, different from the information literacy that educators and media theorists have been talking about for decades. It requires a literacy in the virtues and perils of both private and public domains. It requires that we acknowledge that certain kinds of sharing can, 25 in fact, advance a wider public good, as well as satisfy our own needs for compassion and counsel. In our house, we have had health issues that we have chosen not to bring to the public sphere of the valley. We have kept them private not because we are embarrassed by them, but because some things we already think about enough 30 and would frankly rather think less about, and we do not need the extra prodding of 1,000 Facebook friends thinking alongside us. Every revelation sends ripples out into the world that collide and bounce back in unpredictable ways, and some human experiences are simply too intense to let loose in that environment. But no doubt something is lost in not bringing that part of our lives to the valley. 35 Somewhere in the world there exists another couple that would benefit from reading a transcript of your lover's quarrel last night, or from watching it live on the webcam. Even a simple what-I-had-for-breakfast tweet might just steer a nearby Twitterer to a good meal. We habitually think of oversharers as egoists and self-aggrandisers. But what media critic Jarvis rightly points out is that there 40 is something profoundly selfish in not sharing.

A crevasse is a deep crack in a glacier or levee.

Mark Zuckerberg's prediction that each year we will share twice as much information as the year before is unlikely to hold true in the long run. But there is no doubt that five years from now, when my children are teenagers, they will be comfortable living in public in ways that will astound and alarm their parents. I can 45 already imagine how powerful the instinct to worry about predators and compromising photos will be. But it will be our responsibility to keep that instinct in check and to recognize that their increasingly public existence brings more promise than peril. We have to learn how to break with that most elemental of parental commandments: Don't talk to strangers. It turns out that strangers have 50 a lot to give us that's worthwhile, and we to them. 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 that each of us will draw in different ways. That we get to make these decisions for ourselves is a step forward; the valley is a much richer and more connected place 55 than the old divide between privacy and celebrity worship was. But it is going to take some time to learn how to live there. 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 MySpace were launched in 2003, Facebook in 2004 the friendship circle has expanded to engulf the whole of the social world, and in so doing, destroyed both its own nature and that of the individual friendship itself. Facebook's very premise and promise is that it makes our friendship circles visible. There they are, my 5 friends, 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 dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a Paris Hilton poster is the celebrity herself. But surely Facebook has its benefits. Long-lost friends can reconnect, far-flung 10 ones can stay in touch. I wonder, though. Having recently moved across the country, I thought that Facebook would help me feel connected to the friends I had left behind. But now I find the opposite is true. Reading about the mundane details 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, and 15 precisely because it reminds me of the real sustenance, the real knowledge, we exchange by e-mail or phone or face-to-face. The whole theatrical quality of the business, the sense that my friends are doing their best to impersonate themselves, only makes it worse. The person I read about, I cannot help feeling, is not quite the person I know. 20

Mark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook.

As for getting back in touch with old friends yes, when they're people you really love, it's a miracle. But most of the time, they're not. They're someone you knew for a summer in camp, or a midlevel friend from high school. They don't matter to you as individuals anymore, certainly not the individuals they are now, they matter because they made up the texture of your experience at a certain moment in your 25 life, in conjunction with all the other people you knew. Tear them out of that texture read about their brats, look at pictures of their vacation and they mean nothing. Tear out enough of them and you ruin the texture itself, replace a matrix of feeling and memory, the deep subsoil of experience, with a spurious sense of familiarity. Your 18-year-old self knows them. Your 40-year-old self should not 30 know them. Finally, the new social networking sites have falsified our understanding of intimacy itself, and with it, our understanding of ourselves. First, that intimacy is confessional an idea both peculiarly American and peculiarly young, perhaps because both types of people tend to travel among strangers, and so believe in 35 the 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 American Idol contestant, the stupid thing you did in high school. Third, that it is reducible, in particular, to the kind of information that social networking sites are most interested in eliciting, consumer preferences. Forget that we're all conducting 40 market research on ourselves. Far worse is that Facebook amplifies our longstanding tendency to see ourselves in just those terms. So information replaces experience, as it has throughout our culture. But when I think about my friends, what makes them who they are, and why I love them, it is not the names of their siblings that come to mind, or their fear of spiders. It is their 45 qualities of character. This one's emotional generosity, that one's moral seriousness, 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, another is 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 things 50 they've done. Character, revealed through action: the two eternal elements of narrative. In order to know people, you have to listen to their stories. But that is precisely what the Facebook page does not leave room for, or 500 friends, time for. Adapted from Faux Friendship by William Deresiewicz, The Chronicle of Higher Education (6 December 2009)

Read the passages in the insert and then answer all the questions which follow. Note that up to fifteen marks will be given for the quality and accuracy of your use of English throughout this Paper. NOTE: When a question asks for an answer IN YOUR OWN WORDS AS FAR AS POSSIBLE and you select the appropriate material from the passages for your answer, you must use your own words to express it. Little credit can be given to answers which only copy words or phrases from the passages. Questions on Passage 1 1. Explain the irony in the phrase intimate strangers (line 9). . . ... [2]
For Examiners Use

2.

The author mentions a different kind of literacy needed today (lines 22 23). What does this new literacy require? Use your own words as far possible. . . . . ... [3]

3.

Using your own words as far as possible, explain what the author means when he says that Every revelation sends ripples out into the world that collide and bounce back in unpredictable ways (lines 32 33). . . ... [2]

4.

In paragraph 6, what adjustments does the author think parents of teenagers have to make in the age of social networking? Use your own words as far as possible. . . . . ... [3] What is the difference implied between talking to strangers and handing over a set of your house keys (line 52)? . [1] Questions on Passage 2 Using your own words as far as possible, explain why the author feels both empty and unpleasantly full when he reads about other peoples lives on Facebook (lines 14 - 15). . . ... [2]

For Examiners Use

5.

6.

7.

What point is the author making in the last sentence of paragraph 5? . ... [1]

8.

Using material from paragraphs 3 to 4, summarise why the author thinks interacting with others on social networking sites is unfulfilling, and the negative impact of using such sites. Write your summary in no more than 120 words, not counting the opening words which are 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,... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... [8]

For Examiners Use

Number of words: ___________

9.

Questions on Passages 1 and 2 Give the meaning of the following words as they are used in the passage. Write your answer in one word or a short phrase. From Passage 1 (a) (b) (c) anecdotes (line 15) post (line 15) profoundly (line 41) .. .. ..

For Examiners Use

From Passage 2 (d) (e) launched (line 2) far-flung (line 10) .. .. [5]

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 in your society? Support your answer with reference to both passages as well as knowledge of your society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

For Examiners Use

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... [8]

For Examiners Use

10