2023 DHS EL Prelims P2 Insert

DUNMAN SECONDARY SCHOOL CANDIDATE NAME CLASS INDEX NUMBER PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION 2023 SECONDARY 4 EXPRESS ENGLISH LANGUAGE 1184/02 Paper 2 Comprehension 21 August 2023 INSERT 1 hour 50 minutes READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST This Insert contains Text 1, Text 2, Text 3 and Text 4. ___________________________________________________________________________ This document consists of 6 printed pages.

2 1184/02/EYE/4EXP/2023 Section A Study the online advertisement (Text 1) and the social media post (Text 2) and answer Questions 1–4 in the Question Paper. Text 1 is taken from an online advertisement about bullying. \ Text 2 is taken from a social media post on how modern technology has made us bystanders. Our phones make us feel like social -media activists but they are actually turning us to bystanders. We post about our outrage at unjust things that happen but there is a huge dissonance between what we publicly declare as our values -online or otherwise- and how we act. Our act of recording a violent event but staying silent and doing nothing to stop the situation from worsening, is a modern manifestation of the bystander effect. We must rem ember that recording an event is not a replacement for action! Let’s be an upstander, not a bystander. You don’t have to get physical to stop bullying. Finding the courage to say ‘That’s not right!’ is the best thing you can do. A bully uses words to hurt. You can use yours to be a hero! Just speak up .

3 1184/02/EYE/4EXP/2023 Section B Text 3 The text below is an account of the writer and his fire-fighting colleagues who were faced with a collapsing building while they were putting out a fire in a warehouse in London. Read the text carefully and answer Questions 5–14 in the Question Paper. 1 I remember it was our third job that night and it was 3 a.m . And there we were - Len, Lofty, Verno and myself, shooting a fifty-foot jet up the face of a tall city warehouse , flames raging as high as it, and thinking nothing at all. You don’t think of anything after the first few hours. You just watch the white pole of water lose itself in the fire and numbed by pr olonged monotony, you think of nothing. Sometimes you move the jet over to another window. Sometimes the orange dims to black, but you only ease your grip on the ice-cold nozzle and continue pouring water carelessly through the window. You know the fire will fester for hours yet. 5 2 However, that night the blank, indefinite hours of waiting were sharply interrupted by an unusual sound. A long rattling crack of bursting brick and mortar perforated the moment echoing through the air like a thunderous declaration of impending chaos. An electric jolt surged through my veins. And then the upper half of that five -storey building heaved towards us. It hung there, poised for a timeless second before tumbling down at us. I was thinking of nothing at all and then I was thinking of everything in the world. In that suspended moment, I was shackled by a mixture of dread and the raw instinct to survive. 10 15 3 In that simple second, my brain digested every detail of the scene. New eyes opened at the sides of my head . These eyes photographed a panorama bounded by the huge length of the building and the narrow lane on either side. Blocking us on the left was the pump, roaring and quivering with effort. Water throbbed from its overflow valves and from leakages in the hose. A ceaseless stream spewed down its sides into the gutter. To the other side of me was a free run up the alley. A couple of lengths of dead, deflated hose wound over to the darkly glistening pavement. A needle of water fountained from a hole in a live hose. 20 4 Behind me, Len and Verno shared the weight of the hos e. They heaved up against the strong backward drag of water pressure. All I had to do was yell ‘Drop it’ and then run. We could risk the live hose snaking up on us. We could run to the right down the free alley- Len, Verno and me - even though any disturbance could trigger the precarious structure to a catastrophic release of bricks and rubble. But I never moved. That long second held me hypnotised, rubber boots cemented to the pavement. Ton upon ton of red-hot brick hovering in the air above us numbed all the initiative , like an icy grip upon my very will. 25 30 5 Three of the storeys, thirty blazing windows and huge frames of black brick, a hundred solid tons of hard, deep Victorian wall, pivoted over towards us and hung flatly over the alley. Some of the moonlight was being shut out and the pathway of light above had been squeezed to a thin line. That was the only silver lining I was hanging on to. And the night fell into deeper gloom. The picture appeared static to the limited surface, but beyond that there was a hidden movement. A wall will fall in many ways. It may sway over to one 35

4 1184/02/EYE/4EXP/2023 side or the other. It may crumble at the very beginning of its fall. It may remain intact and fall flat. Regardless, its might is unquestionable. This wall fell as flat as a pancake. It clung to its shape through ninety degrees to the horizontal. Then it detached itself from the pivot and slammed down on top of us . A s if a thunderclap had condensed and squeezed itself into the space of my eardrum, I was jolted to my senses and dropped the hose and crouched. Later, Verno said that I knelt slowly on one knee with a bowed head like a man about to be knighted. Well, I got my knighting-from the bricks and mortar that came burning in succession into the flesh of my face. 40 45 6 Lofty who was by the pump, was killed. Len, Verno and myself they dug out. Remarkably, there was only a scant amount of bricks on top of us. We had been perfectly framed, through divine intervention, by one of those symmetrical, rectangular window spaces. Adapted from The Wall by William Samson

5 1184/02/EYE/4EXP/2023 Section C Text 4 The article below is an excerpt on Asian elephants. Read the article carefully and answer Questions 15–20 in the Question Paper. 1 2 3 4 5 6 The Asian elephant is far less studied by scientists than the African savanna elephant — especially in the wild. So over the past two decades, a dedicated group of researchers has been filling in these gaps, revealing an animal that’s different from its Afric an cousins. There’s an emerging consensus that Asian elephants are highly intelligent, on par with species such as dolphins and chimpanzees. For instance, some have shown an awareness of their own body and mirror reflections, an exceedingly rare skill in t he animal kingdom. Not only that, they’re also very flexible, navigating a variety of habitats, from open grasslands to agricultural fields to tea plantations heavily used by people. For a long time, scientists assumed Asian elephants had social structure s similar to those of African savanna elephants. This was certainly true on the surface: Both long -lived species gather in herds of related adult females and calves, with males leaving the group during adolescence, when they’re eight to 13 years old. But a key aspect of African savanna elephant society—that the oldest female, the matriarch, is the most dominant —doesn’t appear with Asian elephants. Instead, the y live in smaller, less hierarchical, and more loosely collected groups that can separate and reunite over time—a fluidity that allows them to adapt to rapidly changing resou