Name of Candidate: _____________________ ( ) Class: ______

BUKIT PANJANG GOVERNMENT HIGH SCHOOL

PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION 2021
SECONDARY 4 EXPRESS
SECONDARY 4 NORMAL ACADEMIC
SECONDARY 5 NORMAL ACADEMIC

ENGLISH LANGUAGE 1128 / 02

Paper 2
Date: 19 August, 2021
Comprehension Duration: 1h 50 min
Time : 1020h – 1210 h

READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST

This Insert contains Text 1, Text 2 and Text 3.

Setters: Christine Png, Ng Ee Ling [Turn over]

This Insert consists of 6 printed pages.

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Section A

Text 1 Study the webpage below and answer Questions 1 – 5 in the Question Booklet.

Waikiki Beach Surf School

Come learn to surf with us!

The feeling of catching a wave is incomparable! Getting out on the waves is as close as it gets to becoming one
with Mother Nature. Surfing is exhilarating, healthy and helps to instil an appreciation for life and the natural
world.

We provide a personalized learning experience. We offer a comprehensive curriculum of basic and advanced
techniques with an instructional session customized to your age, skill level, and personal goals.
The result of this dynamic combination? An exceptional learning experience — delivered with passion and
purpose — that focuses on your development and enhances your love of the sport.

OUR SURFING INSTRUCTORS

All our instructors are passionate about
surfing. They love to share their love of
surfing. They are friendly and approachable,
always coaching with a smile and also
attentive.

All our surfing instructors are certified

lifeguards and also have surfing
qualifications certified by the state of Hawaii.

We provide more instructors and lifeguards

in our lessons than any other surf school on
the island.
LESSONS
In addition to group lessons and private lessons, we offer private group lessons. We also provide lessons for the
advanced surfer who is on the search for a competitive edge or simply looking to push themselves to their own
personal limits. Our lessons come in two-hour sessions or three-hour sessions.
Prices of lessons include the rental of surfboards and all the equipment you need for surfing. All you have to bring
is your swimsuit or board shorts, towel, sunscreen and change of clothes. Click HERE FOR prices and more
details.

TESTIMONIALS
If you are looking for a beautiful place and great instruction, this Brian was helpful and professional and would
is where you should go. Ashley and his team are competent and give me feedback after every ride, telling me
friendly, and take great care to ensure you are safe! what I was doing wrong. It was an amazing
experience! I achieved a breakthrough
Tan Wee Kiat on Tripadvisor because of Brian’s coaching!
Craig Evans on Facebook
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Section B
Text 2
Read the text below carefully and answer Questions 6 to 16 in the Question Booklet.

In the text below, the writer describes an incident that happened during their first spring in Corfu,
Greece when he was 11. The family, consisting of his mother, two older brothers (aged 21 and 23)
and an elder sister (18), had moved to Corfu six months earlier. Spiro is a local whom they
befriended shortly after they arrived on Corfu.

1 With March came the spring. The valley was flooded with wildflowers: the pink of pyramid orchids,
yellow of crocus, blue spikes of asphodels, and deep rich red of anemones. The flowers chuckled
among themselves as they sent their whispers in the gentle breeze. The olive groves were alive and
rustling with newly arrived birds: the hoopoes probed their long curved beaks at the soft earth; the
goldfinches, chirping and twittering, danced merrily from twig to twig. In the water-filled ditches, 5
the frogs that looked newly enameled snored a rapturous chorus in the lush weeds.

2 For Margo, her personal appearance, always of absorbing interest to her, now became almost an
obsession. Singing shrilly and untunefully, she would drift about the house carrying piles of clothes
or bottles of scent. She would dive into the bathroom and once in there she was as hard to dislodge
as a barnacle from a rock. The family in turn would bellow and batter on the door, getting no more 10
satisfaction than an assurance that she was nearly finished, an assurance that we had learnt by bitter
experience not to have any faith in. Eventually, she would emerge humming, glowing and
immaculate, and amble down to the olive-groves to sunbathe or go down to the sea and swim. It
was during one of these excursions to the sea that she met a good-looking young man. With unusual
modesty, she did not inform anyone of her frequent meetings with this young man, feeling, as she 15
told us later, that we would not be interested.

3 It was, of course, Spiro, who discovered it. He watched over Margo’s welfare with the earnest
concern of a guard dog and there was precious little Margo could do without Spiro knowing about
it. He cornered Mother in the kitchen one morning, glanced surreptitiously round to make sure they
were not overheard, sighed deeply and broke the news to her. 20

4 ‘I’m very sorry to tell you this, Mrs. Durrell, but I think you ought to know.’
Mother by now had grown accustomed to Spiro’s conspiratorial air when he came to deliver some
item of information about the family, and it no longer worried her.
‘What’s the matter, Spiro?’ she asked.
‘It’s Missy Margo,’ said Spiro sorrowfully. 25
‘What about her?’
‘Did you know she is seeing a man?’ he inquired in a slightly alarmed whisper.
‘A man? Oh… er…yes, I did know,’ said Mother, lying valiantly.
‘Golly! Mrs. Durrell! Missy Margo is still young! She should not be alone with a man, Mrs. Durrell!
It’s not safe at all!’ 30
‘All right, Spiro,’ said Mother soothingly, ‘I shall speak to Margo about it.’

5 Acting on the information received, Mother mentioned the matter to Margo and suggested that the
man be invited to tea. Delighted, Margo went off to inform him. Mother warned the rest of us to be
on our best behaviour when Margo’s male friend came to visit.

6 The male friend, when he arrived, turned out to be a tall young man, with meticulously waved hair, 35
and a flashy smile that managed to convey the minimum of humour with the maximum of
condescension. He picked up Mother’s hand and pressed her hand to his lips, then surveyed the rest
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of us, nodding slowly and deliberately. Mother, feeling the hackles of the family rising, threw herself
desperately into the breach.

7 ‘Lovely to meet you…please have a seat … please have a scone… there’s cake too,’ Mother said, 40
as she handed him a piece of cake.
‘So kind,’ murmured the male friend, leaving us in some doubt as to whether he was referring to
himself or us. There was a pause.

8 ‘He’s on holiday here,’ Margo announced suddenly.

‘Really?’ said Larry sharply. ‘On holiday? Amazing!’ 45
‘I had a holiday once,’ said Leslie, as he chewed his scone.
Mother glared at Leslie and Larry but both of them failed to notice.

9 ‘Sugar?’ she asked, ‘Sugar in your tea?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ replied the man.

10 There was another short silence. We all sat and watched Mother pouring out tea and searching her 50
mind desperately for a topic of conversation. At length the male friend turned to Larry.

11 ‘You write, I believe? Margo tells me you are a writer,’ he said with a complete lack of interest.
Larry’s eyes glittered. Mother, seeing the danger signs rushed in quickly before he could reply.

12 ‘Oh yes, he’s always typing at his typewriter.’

‘I always feel that I could write superbly if I tried,’ remarked the male friend. 55
‘He swims well,’ said Margo, ‘and he goes out terribly far.’
‘I have no fear,’ Margo’s male friend said modestly. ‘I am a superb swimmer, so I have no fear.
When I ride the horse, I have no fear, for I ride superbly. I can sail the boat magnificently too. I sail
the boat magnificently in the typhoon without fear.’

13 He sipped his tea delicately as he regarded our faces. 60

‘You see,’ he went on, in case we had missed the point, ‘you see, I am not a fearful man.’
‘Oh yes, and we are so honoured by your presence in our house,’ Larry whispered to me.

Adapted from ‘My Family and Other Animals’ by Gerald Durrell

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Section C
Text 3
Read the text below carefully and answer Questions 17 to 23 in the Question Booklet.

The article below is about how life goes on at Chernobyl 35 years after the world’s worst nuclear
accident.

1 At 1:24 a.m. on April 26, 1986, an explosion ripped through Reactor Number Four of the
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, just 11 miles from the Ukranian town of Chernobyl. Seconds
before Reactor Number Four exploded, the temperature inside its core reached 4,650 degrees
Celsius; the surface of the sun is 5,500. The force of the explosion, equivalent to 66 tons of TNT,
blasted away the roof of the reactor’s 20-story building, and ejected at least 28 tons of highly 5
radioactive debris into the immediate surroundings. It was the worst nuclear power plant disaster
in history. Although there were mass evacuations after the accident, the immediate area was
never fully emptied of people, and it never could be. A radioactive catastrophe of this magnitude
is too dangerous to be abandoned.

2 While radioactive particles travelled far and wide, the clean-up effort focused on the Chernobyl 10
Exclusion Zone, everything within a 30-kilometre (19-mile) radius of ground zero. Evacuations
of the zone began 36 hours after the accident, the first being the 50,000 inhabitants of a town
two miles away from the nuclear power plant and built to house its workers.

3 The workers involved in the clean-up effort on decontamination were called liquidators. They
had an impossible job. Radioactive particles are invisible and have no taste or smell, yet in the 15
hot spots they contaminated everything, from bricks to livestock to vegetation. These particles
cannot be destroyed; all the liquidators could do was inter them or seal them up in some way.
Some worked around the villages bulldozing crops, cutting down forests, and even burying the
top layer of the earth itself. Around the nuclear power plant, some jobs—like lifting highly
radioactive debris or pouring concrete to seal the reactor—were so dangerous the men could 20
absorb lethal doses of radiation in minutes. The number of liquidators involved is likely over
half a million. They came from all over the former U.S.S.R., and most were young men at the
time. Perhaps 10 percent of them are still alive today. Thirty-one people died as a direct result of
the accident, according to the official Soviet death toll. Evgeniy Valentey has been an IT
specialist here for 10 years says, “I think of the people really victimized in the process of 25
liquidation. In the Soviet Union, the method was to cover everything with human lives.”

4 Elena Buntova, along with other scientists, answered the call of Chernobyl for a completely
different reason from the liquidators. As Doctor of Biology, she came after the accident to study
the effects of radiation on wildlife. She never left. “In the first years after the accident, the best
scientists from all over the U.S.S.R. came to Chernobyl for work, so it was really interesting to 30
cooperate with them,” Buntova said. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and also where she met
her husband Sergei Lapiha, a photographer. He grew up near Chernobyl, and they got to know
each other in a café inside the exclusion zone.

5 Because of their connection to the place, Buntova and Lapiha are part of a small group of
resettlers who have permission from the Ukrainian government to live in the zone full time. They 35
admit that living in Chernobyl is risky and troublesome, especially because children are
forbidden. They each had children before they met, but because anyone under 18 is more
susceptible to ionizing radiation, their children and now their grandchildren could never come
inside the zone. Still, they have lived here for over 30 years, and now that they are in their 60s
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and retired, they don’t plan on going anywhere. Few people live inside the exclusion zone full 40
time. Those who flouted the evacuation order and returned to their home villages after the
accident are now in their late 70s or early 80s, and many have died in the last five years. Radiation
is a constant companion here. In the inhabited places, the background levels are generally low.
In others they are dangerously high.

6 Of the approximately 7,000 people who come in and out of the zone to work, 3,000 arrive by 45
train each day to work at the nuclear power plant. The rest of the labor force have shifts of either
15 days a month or four days a week—schedules devised to minimize exposure to ionizing
radiation. They are security guards, firefighters, scientists, or those who maintain the
infrastructure of this unique community. Because Chernobyl is their half-time home and not their
permanent residence, they occupy the apartments that were evacuated in 1986. In the evenings, 50
they might break the radiation safety regulations and go for a swim in the river. Though the plant
no longer produces electricity, the decommissioning of the three remaining reactors will take
until at least 2065.

7 According to Bruno Chareyron, Director with the Commission for Research and Information
about Radiation, humankind does not currently have the technical solutions or the financial 55
means to manage a disaster like this. Simply put, though thousands of people still work on-site
every day, “The Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, it’s not manageable at all.”

Adapted from an article dated 26 April, 2021 by Jennifer Kingsley

End of Insert