2025 RI Prelims H2 ELit P2 QP

[Turn over RAFFLES INSTITUTION 2025 YEAR 6 PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION HIGHER 2 LITERATURE IN ENGLISH 9539/02 Paper 2 Reading Literature featuring the English Romantic Period (1785–1832) Wednesday 17 September 2025 3 hours 1330-1630 No Additional Materials are required. Set texts may be taken into the examination room. Pages may be flagged with paper clips or by folding the page corners. Page numbers can be highlighted, underlined, or marked out with vertical lines. Any other kind of folding or flagging of pages in texts (for example, use of sticky notes or tape flags) is not permitted. READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST Writing paper will be provided. If you need additional paper ask the invigilator. Write your name and CT group on all the work you hand in. Answer three questions: one question from Section A, one question from Section B, and one question from Section C. You are reminded of the need for good English and clear presentation in your answers. At the end of the examination tie your answer sheets to each section securely. Hand in your answers separately. All questions in this paper carry equal marks. This document consists of 8 printed pages.

2 © RI LIT H2 PRELIM 2025 9539/02/25 Section A Answer one question in this section. 1 Either (a) The following passage is taken from a novel called The Bee Sting (2023) by Paul Murray. Write a critical appreciation of the passage, considering in detail ways in which your response is shaped by the writer’s uses of form, style and language. Cass and Elaine first met in Chemistry class, when Elaine poured iodine on Cass’s eczema during an experiment. It was an accident; she’d cried more than Cass did, and insisted on going with her to the nurse. They’d been friends ever since. Every morning Ca ss called to Elaine’s house and they walked to school together. At lunchtime, they rolled up their long skirts and wandered around the supermarket, listening to music from Elaine’s phone, eating croissants from the bakery section that were gone by the time they got to the checkout. In the evening, they went to each other’s houses to study. Cass felt she’d known Elaine for ever; it made no sense that they had not always been friends. Their lives were so similar it was almost eerie. Both girls came from well -known families in the town: Cass’s father, Dickie, owned the local Volkswagen dealership, while Elaine’s dad, Big Mike, was a businessman and cattle farmer. Both girls were of slightly above-average height; both were bright, in fact they were consistently at the top of their class. Both intended to leave here some day and never come back. Elaine had golden hair, green eyes, a perfect figure. When she bought clothes online, they always fitted perfectly, as if they’d been made with her in mind. Writing about her in her journal, Cass used words like grace and style. She had what the French called je ne sais quoi 1. Even when she was clipping her toenails, she looked like she was eating a peach. When Cass came round to Elaine’s house, they would sit in her bedroom with the carousel lamp on and look at the Miss Universe Ireland website. Elaine was thinking seriously about entering, though not for the title itself so much as the opportunities it might offer. The previous year’s winner was now brand ambassador for a juice company. Cass thought Elaine was prettier than any of the contestants pictured online. But it was tricky. Each of the girls competing to be Miss Universe Ireland, and from there to be Miss Universe for the world/universe overall, had an advers ity they had overcome. One had been a refugee from a war in Africa. Another had needed surgery when she was a small girl. A very thin contestant had once been very fat. The adversity had to be something bad, like a learning disability, but not really bad, like being chained up in a basement for ten years by a paedophile. Cass’s eczema would be a perfect adversity; they wondered, if she held her skin up against Elaine’s long enough, whether she could pass it on to her. But it didn’t seem to work. Elaine said the adversity requirement was unfair. When you think about it, it’s almost like a kind of discrimination, she said. 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 1 je ne sais quoi – an appealing quality that cannot be described or named easily.

3 © RI LIT H2 PRELIM 2025 9539/02/25 [Turn over The housekeeper knocked on the door to say it was time for Elaine’s swimming lesson. Elaine rolled her eyes. The swimming pool was always full of Band-Aids and old people. Coming from here, she said. If that isn’t an adversity, I don’t know what is. Elaine hated their town. Everyone knew everyone, everybody knew your business; when you walked down the street people would slow down their cars to see who you were so they could wave at you. There were no proper shops; instead of McDonald’s and Starbucks, they had Binchy Burgers and Mangan’s Café, where the owners worked behind the counter and asked after your parents. You can’t even buy a sausage roll without having to tell someone your life story, she complained. The smallness wouldn’t have been so bad if the townsfolk had had a little more sophistication. But their only interest, besides farming and the well -being of the microchip factory, was Gaelic games. Football, hurling2, camogie3, the county, the Cup, the under-21s – that was all anyone ever talked about. Elaine hated GAA 4. She was bad at sports, in spite of her grace. She was always the last up the rope in gym class; in games, she confi ned herself to the sidelines, where she scowled, flicked her hair, and wafted reluctantly back and forth with the general direction of play, like a lovely frond at the bottom of a noisy, grunting ocean. The Tidy Towns Committee, of which Cass’s mother was a member, was always shiteing5 on about the natural beauty of the area, but Elaine did not accept this. Nature in her eyes was almost as bad as sports. The way it kept growing? The way things, like crops or whatever, would die and then next year they came back? Did no one else get how creepy that was? I’m not being negative, she said. I just want to live somewhere I can get good coffee and not have to see nature and everyone doesn’t look like they were made out of mashed potato. Cass didn’t care for GAA either, and she agreed about the general lack of je ne sais quoi. For her, though, the presence of Elaine was enough to cancel out the town’s faults. She had never felt so connected to someone. When they messaged each other at night – sometimes they’d stay up till two in the morning – they got so in synch it was almost like they were the same person. If Elaine texted Cass to say WTF was up with that jumper today, she would know immediately whose jumper she was talking about; a single, unexplained word, like bagatelle, could make her laugh so loud that her dad would hear from across the landing and come in and tell her to go to sleep. In some ways, that was the best time of all – better even than being together. As she lay in bed, messages flying back and forth between them, Cass would feel like she was flying too, far above the town, in a pure space that belonged completely to her and her best friend. 40 45 50 55