RI 2023 Y6 GP Prelims P2

Raffles Institution 2023 Year 6 Preliminary Examination General Certificate of Education Advanced Level Higher 1 GENERAL PAPER 8807/02 Paper 2 28 August 2023 INSERT 1 hour 30 minutes READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST This Insert contains the passages for Paper 2. This document consists of 3 printed pages and 1 blank page

2 Passage 1. Francis Hezel discusses how culture can thrive in a globalising world. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Culture change is upon us, many fear, like a tsunami advancing rapidly to the shore threatening to engulf whole populations, erasing them and all memory of what they once held dear . The watchword, then, is cultural preservation: keeping a close lookout for whatever might imperil the culture, eradicating anything that threatens to suffocate those cultural forms we know as customs, employing the same measures we have learned to take to preserve our wildlife. Indeed, there is no indication that the storm will abate in this present era of globalisation. We can expect much more of the same in the years ahead. Under these conditions, it would appear that our cultures are doomed. Yet, consider the ludicrous notion that Italy will look and smell and sound just like Germany after a given number of years of shared membership in the European Union. The widely shared fear, often mongered by uninformed experts, that globalisation will extract the exotic taste from all cultures so that people will be blended into the same bland batch of cultural dough is groundless. On the contrary, cultures manage to survive for hundreds of years despite the many mutations they have undergone. A striking example of this is Japanese culture. What does life in urban Tokyo today, with men and women in Western business dress commuting to work by subway or bullet train, have in common with the days of the sworded samurai and graceful geishas? Not much, on the surface of it all. Yet they are all distinctively Japanese. Is it in the formal courtesy that Japanese pay to those with whom they deal? Is it rela ted to the sparseness in Japanese décor, or focusing on a single detail and somehow finding all of life embodied in one leaf or one blossom? None of these really comes close to summing up what it means to be a Japanese, of course. Yet it does suggest that it is a combination of features that goes i nto the making of a culture: indefinable, intrinsic qualities that are passed down from one generation to the next — not through the DNA, but through the social environment with its hundreds of personal interactions. Many perceive culture to be the sum total of the products of a people, and hence we may have been focusing too exclusively on preservation of customs and the external features of that cultur