2025 Prelims SAJC P2 Insert

INSERT ST ANDREW’S JUNIOR COLLEGE JC2 Preliminary Examination Name: ____________________________ ( ) Civics Group: ______________________ GENERAL PAPER 8881/02 Paper 2 2 September 2025, Tuesday INSERT 1 hour 30 minutes READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST This Insert contains the passages for Paper 2. This document consists of 4 printed pages.

2 Passage 1. An author cautions about the dangers of woke culture. 1 Woke culture began as a movement awakening people to social injustices, urging society to confront racism, gender inequality and historical wrongs. Yet, in its extreme form, it has become something else entirely: an ideological straitjacket that stifles debate, demands ideological purity, and thrives on public shaming rather than meaningful change. 2 At the heart of the problem lies woke culture’s impulse to suppress all that dissents and offends, viewing differences of opinion as moral failures . The very people who once championed open discussion now undermine free speech . Take J.K. Rowling, the renowned author of Harry Potter, who was demonised as transphobic for raising concerns about the transitioning of minors and a woman’s right to use single-sex spaces. Instead of engaging with Rowling’s arguments, critics cancelled and even intimidated her with violence, branding her a source of hate speech . Similarly, woke culture obsessively cleanses the past, rather than learning from it. Since the police killing of George Floyd erupted into the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, woke protesters have defaced and destroyed colonial statues around the world. Race campaigners have also branded the decision not to remove Cecil Rhode’s* statue in Oxford University as an act of institutional racism, ignoring the opportunity to learn from its history and contextualisation. As the nineteenth-century philosopher Ernest Renan put it, the social capital of a people is its ‘shared possession of a rich heritage of memories’ . Who benefits from the senseless destruction of this heritage? In an open society, disagreement should lead to debate, not witch hunts and removals. 5 10 15 20 3 Woke culture also fails to deal with the complexity of the world by reducing individuals to groups based on race, gender and class. It turns complicated issues into simple clashes of good and evil, conferring a halo of virtue on those who pick the right side. In 2023, the Israel-Hamas war shattered this worldview that the powerless can do no wrong, unlike the powerful, and that nobody can be both. The polarised passions and viral slogans were worsened by the echo -chamber effect of social media, where many were transfixed by the scale of Hamas’s destructions or Gaza’s agony. This binary worldview is tailor-made for posturing, but it prohibits the nuanced ju dgments that complicated real-world issues demand. 25 4 And posturing it