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 of three, can be taught entirely arbitrary rules for playing a game. Not only that, when a “puppet” (controlled by an experimenter) arrives on the scene and begins to violate the rules, children will crit icise the puppet, protesting with comments such as “You are doing that wrong!”, and they will even attempt to teach the puppet to do better. 30 35 6 Let us return to the case of sport. A game may start by kicking a pig’s bladder from one end of a village to another, with ill-defined teams and structure, and potentially riotous violence. But it ends up, after a few centuries, with a comprehensive rule book dictating every detail of the game. We even create international governing bodies to ensure that sport remains civilised. 40 7 The urge to overturn stifling, unjust, or simply downright pointless rules is entirely justified. But without some rules – and some tendenc y for us to stick to them –   1 A red card is shown to a player who has committed a serious offence, and the player must immediately leave the field and cannot return for the rest of the game.

3   society would slide rapidly into pandem onium. Indeed, many social scientists would see our tendency to create, stick to, and enforce rules as the very foundation of social and economic life. 45 Passage 2. Author B discusses the problems related to making and following rules. 1 Rules seem hardwired into our DNA. In fact, our species’ ability to latch onto, and enforce, arbitrary rules is crucial to our success as a species. If each of us had to justify each rule from scratch, our minds would grind to a halt. Instead, we learn the hugely complex systems of linguistic and social norms without asking too many questions – we simply absorb “the way we do things around here”. 5 2 But we must be careful – for this way tyranny also lies. Humans have a powerful sense of wanting to enforce sometimes oppressive patterns of behaviour – correct spelling, hats off in church, standing for the national anthem – irrespective of their justification. And while the shift from “This is what we all do” to “This is what we all ought to do” is a well-known ethical fallacy, it is deeply embedded in human psychology. 10 3 One danger is that rules can develop their own momentum: people can become so fervent about arbitrary rules of dres s, dietary restrictions, or the proper treatment of the sacred that they ma y exact extreme punishments to maintain them. Political ideologues and religious fanatics often mete out such retribution but so do repressive states, bullying bosses, and coercive partners: the rules must be obeyed, just because they are the rules. Not only that, but, absurdly, failing to enforce rules (not to draw attention to a person wearing inappropriate dress, for example) itself becomes something punishable. 15 4 And then there is “rule-creep”: rules just keep being added such that our liberty becomes increasingly curtailed. Planning restrictions, safety regulations, and risk assessments that accumulate endlessly may extend far beyond their initial intention. Restrictions on renovating ancient buildings can be so stringent that no renovation is feasible and the buildings collapse; environmental assessments for new woodlands can be so severe that tr ee planting becomes almost impossible; regulations on drug discovery can be so arduous that a potentially valuable medicine is abandoned. Even worse, we c an become so focused on sticking to the rules that we ignore their consequences. 20 25 5 Individuals, and societies, face a conti nual battle over rules – and we must be cautious about their purpose. So, yes, “standing on the right” on an escalator may speed up everyone’s commute to work, but be careful of conventions that have no obvious benefit to all, especially those that discriminate and condemn. The latter can become the instruments of tyranny. Rules, like good policing, should rely on our consent. So perhaps the best advice is mostly to follow rules, but always to ask wh y. 30 35

4   Passage 3. Author C warns about the dangers of conforming to group rules. 1 Evolution has led us to crave groups. We were raised in tribes which supported and protected us, and being part of a social group gives us a sense of belonging. While there are many benefits to being in a group, the problem is that there is also a powerful force to conform to the rules, customs, ideas, and standards of the group. 5 2 We belong to groups on Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. The wide range of social media sites and contributors should mean that we read a wide variety of opinions, but the opposite is generally the case. People dwell in echo chambers where they read posts which reinforce their own views, opinions, and prejudices. Increasingly, people align themselves with the norms and expectations