2024 RI Y6 GP Timed Practice P2 Insert (8881)

Raffles Institution 2024 Year 6 Term 3 Timed Practice General Certificate of Education Advanced Level Higher 1     GENERAL PAPER 8881/02 Paper 2 16 May 2024 INSERT 1 hour 30 minutes READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST This Insert contains the passages for comprehension. This document consists of 4 printed pages.

2   Passage 1. Author A believes that following rules is important. 1 It is hard to imagine life in a world without rules. In addition to our bodies following some very strict and complex biological laws, without which we would all be doomed, the very words I am writing now follow the rules of English. I might dreamily think of liberating myself from them. But would this new linguistic freedom really do me any good or set my thoughts free? Breaking away from the rules of my language would not make me unchained but would instead make me incoherent. 5 2 Consider, too, how rules are the ess ence of sport, games, and puzzles – even when their entire purpose is supposedly fun. The rules of chess, say, can trigger a tantrum if I want to move the king more than one square in any direction, but find that they say I cannot. Similarly, find me a football fan who has not at least once raged against a referee showing a player the red card 1 . But chess or football without rules would not be chess or football – they would be entirely formless and meaningless activities. Indeed, a game with no rules is no game at all. 10 3 Many of the norms of everyday life per form precisely the same function as the rules of games: telling us what “moves” we can and cannot make. The conventions of “please” and “thank you” that seem so irksome to young children are indeed arbitrary, but the fact that we have such conventions – it is crucial that we agree what they are – is part of what makes our social interactions run smoothly. Rules about driving on the left or the right, stopping at red lights, queuing, not littering, and so on fall into the same category. They are the building blocks of a harmonious society. 15 20 4 Of course, there has long been an appetite among some people for a less formalised society where individual fr eedom takes precedence: an anarchy. But anarchy is inherently unstable – humans continually, and spontaneously, generate new rules governing behaviour, comm unication, and economic exchange, and they do so as rapidly as old rules are dismantled. These rules are not just invented by rulers and imposed from the top down; instead, they often arise, unbidden, from the needs of mutually agreeable social and economic interactions. 25 5 In humans, rules also take hold early. Experiments show that children, by the age