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CRESCENT GIRLS’ SCHOOL

SECONDARY THREE

MID-YEAR EXAMINATION 2012

ENGLISH LANGUAGE 1128/02 PAPER 2 COMPREHENSION

2 MAY 2012 1 hr 50 min

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READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST This Insert contains TEXT 1, TEXT 2 and TEXT 3. The questions are in Answer Booklets 1 and 2.

This paper consists of 5 printed pages, including the cover page

Class: Register No: Name:

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TEXT 1 SECTION A (5m)

Study the pop-up webpage on your school’s website below and answer Questions 1-

4 in the Answer Booklet.

DO YOU HAVE A PASSION TO SERVE THE COMMUNITY?

QUALITIES OF A VOLUNTEER

The Handicap Welfare Association (HWA) Volunteer should be:

• Keen to learn how to look after the welfare of handicapped and wheel-chair

bound people in Singapore

• Good at communicating with others sensitively, patiently and enthusiastically

• Willing to undergo up to 5 hours of in-house training by professional care-

givers from the health sector

• Willing to serve at the HWA on a weekly basis for a minimum of ONE year

upon completion of training

• Interested in working with like-minded people in a congenial environment that

mixes fun and play with serious and sincere work

TRAINING AREAS

Volunteers will be trained to:

• Handle the wheel-chair in a variety of situations and terrains

• Manage the physical and emotional needs of the wheel-chair bound

• Supervise and mentor younger and newer volunteers

• Handle basic therapy equipment at the HWA Clinic

To sign up, click HERE!

A B

C D

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TEXT 2 SECTION B (20m)

The text below describes a group of travellers traversing through Jordan. Read it

carefully and answer Questions 5-14 in the Answer Booklet.

1 We had already spent a week in Syria, slogging through mud and snow, travelling over fifteen hundred miles in a rented car, seeing and smelling and hearing extraordinary things. We’d wandered through the ruins of Apamea under a rainbow while sheep lazily trimmed the grass beside us and shepherds plagued us to buy “ancient” coins. We’d happily got lost in the miles and miles of Aleppo, where a jovial old man taught us the art of carving woodblocks; and where we strolled through at the metalworkers’ district, every man and boy was banging giant caldrons into shape. It was a clangourous moment.

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2 Best of all, we’d driven through the desert in the pouring rain. It rained buckets like never before! We didn’t see anything or anyone for hours – and then the weather cleared and we entered the ancient oasis city of Palmyra, with its mile-long royal procession route that starts at one end with the temple to the god Bel, and ends at the palace where Queen Zenobia reigned. We were virtually the only tourists on a cold, clear day.

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15 3 Through the night we drove south from Amman, the capital of Jordan,

down a four-lane highway across the desert toward the port of Aqaba. Suddenly we swerved off onto a sinuous two-lane road that rose into the hills. The fog became thick pea soup, and we took turns running in front of the car, hooting and flapping our arms to indicate the route. We became slightly hysterical from our close calls on corkscrew mountain curves. But we made it. We finally reached the over-crowded visitors’ centre , where we rented four horses and to our relief, amusement and amazement, quickly found a chatty, intelligent local guide with perfectly-accented New York English, despite his never having left Jordan.

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25 4 As we entered Petra, the strangeness of the place overwhelmed us.

Everything here was improbable – the remoteness, the mineral force, and especially the bizarre juxtaposition of colour. It was so cold that Mohammed, our guide, tied us into our newly-bought kaffiyehs, those red-and-white tasselled scarves that Americans associate with Arafat but which every man wears in this part of the Arab world. The refreshing experience notwithstanding, we needed to bundle up because Mohammed was leading us eight hundred steps up to Ed Deir – the Monastery.

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5 Mohammed was extremely tactful. He knew just when to pause for “a view”, so we could catch our breath without being made to feel out of shape. He was also practical and kind about my nearly paralysing vertigo. I would never have thought myself capable of scrambling so nauseatingly high. As though to mock my fears, a black-and-white baby goat gambolled all the way up alongside us, spilling over the rocks. A goatherd of eight ran past with bare feet in the snow in pursuit. Beside us a cataract spun glass, or was it merely the mountain lake?

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(Adapted from Jordan: Jinn City by Edmund White; in Conde Nast Traveler – Book of

Unforgettable Journeys: Great Writers on Great Places)

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TEXT 3 SECTION C (25m)

The text below discusses about the actions of Queen Rania of Jordan. Read it

carefully and answer Questions 15-22 in the Answer Booklet.

1 To the western world, she is the closest the 21st century gets to Princess Diana: glamorous, beautiful, charitable and royal. But to many of her citizens, she is extravagant, meddling and possibly even corrupt. So which is the real Queen Rania?

2 The 40-year-old Palestinian never expected to be Queen of Jordan. She was born and brought up in Kuwait; her father, a doctor, was first-generation middle-class. Rania went to university in Cairo and her family moved to Jordan after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Rania had worked in marketing for Citibank and Apple and spoke perfect English. When she became queen she threw herself into selling Jordon to the West.

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10 3 It wasn’t long before she was appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Oprah introduced the queen as an ‘international fashion icon’. Such an epithet was fine for Princess Diana. But in Jordan where it has no oil resources of its own, the financial crisis has hit hard and food prices have soared, the Jordanians resent what they see as the queen’s profligacy. This anger came to a head last September when Rania held a lavish 40th birthday party in the Wadi Rum desert, Jordan’s answer to Monument Valley. Six hundred guests were flown in from all over the world. Two giant figure ‘40’s were beamed on to mountainous outcrops – although the neighbourhood villages don’t even have electricity. Locals still speak of the water used to dampen down the sand so that the guests could walk more easily, though there were desperate water shortages nearby.

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4 Fares Al-Fayez is a senior figure in the Bani Sakher tribe, one of the

bulwarks1 of the Jordanian monarchy. He and 35 other tribesmen drafted a now-notorious letter to the king, complaining about the queen. In doing so, they smashed a taboo: criticising the king is illegal, and his wife had always, in practice, been protected too. This loyal monarchist explained, ‘She is spending a lot of money on clothes, jewellery and shoes. Some people spend hundreds of millions and others have nothing to eat but bread and tea. It’s painful and sad.’

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30 5 It’s not just the queen’s liberalism and western demeanour that some

Jordanians dislike. The tribesmen resent her Palestinian origins; so do a group of former army generals who wrote to the king last year claiming that she was helping tens of thousands of fellow Palestinians to gain Jordanian citizenship. But a more serious claim is that she interferes in politics, which the constitution does not permit. She is certainly feistier than her husband. When a British journalist went to interview the king, he was surprised to find not only that Rania insisted on being there, but that she kept interrupting and contradicting the king’s answers.

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6 Jordanians claim that Rania has a hand in appointing ministers and local politicians. Of course this is impossible to prove, but people point to friends and associates of hers who have won top jobs, often at a surprisingly young age. Adham Gharaibeh is a leader of the youth movement, and helped organise the recent pro-democracy protests. He wears western clothes and belongs to the Twitter generation. But even he

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1 Bulwark: any person or thing giving strong support or encouragement in time of need, danger, or doubt.

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says, ‘We’re standing against the queen because of her interference in political issues. She’s using her position as the wife of the king and making business all the time with her family. Look at her brother, for instance. Where did he get all his money from?’

7 Allegations of nepotism and corruption are now widespread. Fares Al-

Fayez, the instigator of the letter, says, ‘There’s a lot of talk that she and her family have taken over institutions and done deals and made money and we don’t want her to combine power and money. Money and power produces corruption.’

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8 The queen’s allies defend her robustly. Salaheddin Al-Bashir, who has been both foreign and justice minister and is now a senator and a lawyer, says, ‘There has to be evidence of her interfering in the political system. I have never had a policy meeting at which she was present and I’ve worked in the Jordanian government.’ A close friend of hers says of the tribesmen’s letter, ‘Traditionalists want to see a woman staying at home. To have a woman in a leadership position – even if she isn’t constitutionally a leader – makes traditionalists troubled.’

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9 Given the political tremors that are shaking all the region’s thrones, neither of them can afford this level of unpopularity. The political analyst Labib Kamhawi, who says he likes her personally, has a few words of advice. ‘I think it’s time she adopted a low-key profile. She should keep quiet and act as the queen of a small and poor country.’

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(Adapted from Queen’s gambit by Mary Ann Sieghart; in The Spectator, 5 March 2011)

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