DSS 2021 SEC4E5N EL PRELIM P2 INSERT

This Insert consists of 6 printed pages including the cover page. DUNMAN SECONDARY SCHOOL . CANDIDATE NAME CLASS INDEX NUMBER PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION 2021 SECONDARY 4 EXPRESS/ 5 NORMAL (ACADEMIC) ENGLISH LANGUAGE 1128/02 Paper 2 Comprehension 23 August 2021 INSERT 1 hour 50 minutes Candidates answer in the Question Booklet. READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST This insert contains Text 1, Text 2 and Text 3.

2 1128/02/PRELIMS/4EXP5NA/2021 Section A Text 1 Study the webpage below and answer Questions 1 – 4 in the Question paper booklet. L Tired of the wasting away the holidays at home? Feeling unproductive and bored? Join us at Food Playground for some Hands-on Cooking Fun! Would you like to learn some practical life skills and unearth your hidden culinary skills during the upcoming school holidays? This 2-day Culinary Skills Boot Camp by Food Playground is the perfect launch pad to help learners achieve the following: Learning Objectives 1. Understand food hygiene and food preparation basics 2. Learn to prepare and cook authentic recipes from scratch 3. Learn how to manage time and work under pressure 4. Learn how to incorporate healthier ingredients in recipes 5. Learn to work in teams and develop empathy This course will be conducted at our own fully equipped cooking studio at Haji Lane. Each class will have a practical and experiential approach to learning. Upon completion, each student will walk away with unforgettable memories and lifelong skills! Discover your Culinary Talent #1 Cooking School in Singapore on TripAdvisor Boot Camps

3 1128/02/PRELIMS/4EXP5NA/2021 Section B Text 2 The text below describes how Aoife who is dyslexic and has difficulty reading, tries to hide her condition. Read the text carefully and answer Questions 5 -15 in the Question Paper Booklet. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Aoife’s daily toil up the stairs of her apartment block was a constant reminder of the secret she was hiding from others. She never took the elevator. ‘I guess this is how my life will always be. Here’s to a healthy lifestyle!’ chuckled Aoife to herself in a bid to make light of what fate had dealt her. Gripping on to the handrail to haul herself up that last flight of stairs, she saw the sign. It would to anyone else, have said ‘Sixth Floor’, but to Aoife, the letters possessed a life of their own, dancing before her. In fact, they were taunting her for her inability to decipher them. Like a deer caught in the headlights she stood and she had to will herself out of that state. One minute the sign might say ‘Sixth Floor’ but the next minute, the letters would have shifted and turned into ’Gut Flour’. She could not read. That was her own private truth. Because of it, she had to lead a double life. But nobody knew. Not a soul. Not her friends, not her colleagues and certainly not her family. She had kept it from all of them, feeling herself brimming with the secret of it her whole life. She had, over the years, perfected a number of implausible acts to cover up her problem. S he said she was short -sighted or had forgotten her glasses or even that her eyes were tired. In restaurants, she would shut her menu - never too fast- and ask her companion to order for her. She had a casual way of passing a page to someone next to her and a sking for it to be read to her. And of course, with a cunning she honed out of necessity, she spotted the kind of people who were only too happy for a chance to show off how well they could read. Then, she listened carefully and with great concentration. She appeared to the world as slightly eccentric and a little detached as she opened up the part of her mind that remembered things so that, if anyone were to question her about the content of the text, she could repeat it back to them flawlessly. Aoife worked in an art store and one day she saw th rough the shop window the famous photographer Evelyn Nemetov, standing on the pavement as if she were just another member of the human race. Not wanting to miss the opportunity of a lifetime, Aoife willed Evelyn to come into the store, beaming sunshine with her smile, and Evelyn did! While Aoife sold her what she needed, they struck up a conversation and what resulted was not what Aoife could ever imagine: she found herself with a job as Evelyn’s assistant. She would be going on photography shoots with her; there was no mention of dealing with contracts or answering letters. Aoife was feeling incredibly lucky. Fate was finally kind to her. However, on her fifth day of work, Evelyn handed her a contract and asked her to fill it in before walking out of the room . Aoife took it a nd laid it on the table. Her hopes were dashed and as reality sank in, Aoife found it difficult to draw breath into her lungs. She scanned the undulating strings of letters whose size tested the eyes. The white page on the table was cra mmed with text, impossibly miniscule text, letters which looked to her like lines of ants crawling over the page. They clustered and rearranged themselves before her. Seconds later, in Aoife’s eyes the text appeared to change: the letters began moving from horizontal lines going from left to right, until they gradually regrouped themselves into long vertical columns going from top to bottom, like grasses swaying in the wind. Suffocating panic crammed Aoife’s throat. Her ideal job was a short-lived fantasy. She was fighting back tears, knowing that it was over, that this job was doomed like many other jobs before it, and she was weighing up the pros and cons of just walking out when she hea rd Evelyn coming back along th e corridor. As she came into the room, she said. ‘All finished with the contract?’ Her mind screamed the two choices: continue her charade and face the music later or end it all now. Delaying the inevitable aftermath seemed more favourable. Aoife lifted t he contract with only the tips of her fingers, masking her emotions with a nod and smile. She wasn’t aware of the 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45

4 1128/02/PRELIMS/4EXP5NA/2021 7 moment in which she made the decision but it felt to her as if the contract radiated toxic material. She slid it into a blue folder and put the folder into a box on top of the filing cabinet. Driven by a burning desire to hold on to the job, she turned around and proclaimed confidently, ‘Yes, the work’s all done.’ Since that day, over the many months she had worked for Evelyn, the blue folder i n the box on the top of the filing cabinet had grown. Every bit of paper she was handed, every letter she opened, every request or contract or application that came through the door, she placed in there. The blue folder was soon a swelling lie threatening to spill at any moment. Any day now, she thought, she would get the bulging folder down and deal with it. Somehow. Adapted from Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’ Farrell 50 55

5 1128/02/PRELIMS/4EXP5NA/2021 Section C Text 3 The article below is about human cloning and the controversy behind it. Read the text carefully and answer Questions 16 - 22 in the Question Paper Booklet. 1 Human cloning is ethically wrong from all facets. Scientists are playing God for selfish reasons: to appease their curiosity , to push boundaries of Science and even worst, to satiate the appalling yet predictable hunger for money. For the laymen, what makes reproductive cloning morally troubling is that its primary purpose is to create children of a certain breed. Although a few eccentric narcissists might aspire