Trial 2020 English Advanced Paper 1 Stimulus Booklet Trial HSC PDF

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José dos Campos, Compsis had grown steadily and successfully. In its largest service line, systems
integration for electronic toll collection (ETC), the company had gained the dominant share of the
Brazilian market and had even managed projects in Australia and India. Compsis had develop...

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2020

English Advanced Paper 1 — Texts and Human Experiences

Stimulus Booklet for Section I _____________ Se c t i onI

Pages

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Te x t1Po e m………………………………………………. . . . . . . . . 2 –3

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Te x t2Re vi e w…………………………………………………. . 4 –5

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Te x t3Sho r ts t or ye x t r a c t………………………………………. 6 –7

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Te x t4Sho r ts t or ye x t r a c t………………………………………. . 8 –9

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Section I Text 1 — Poem White stucco dreaming sprinkled in the happy dark of my mind is early childhood and black humour white stucco dreaming and a black Labrador an orange and black panel-van called the ‘black banana’ with twenty blackfellas hanging out the back blasting through the white stucco umbilical of a working class tribe front yards studded with old black tyres that became mutant swans overnight attacked with a cane knife and a bad white paint job white stucco dreaming and snakes that morphed into nylon hoses at the terror of Mum’s scorn snakes whose cool venom we sprayed onto the white stucco, temporarily blushing it pink amid an atmosphere of Saturday morning grass cuttings and flirtatious melodies of ice-cream trucks that echoed through little black minds and sent the labrador insane

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chocolate hand prints like dreamtime fraud laid across white stucco and mud cakes on the camp stove that just made Dad see black no tree safe from treehouse sprawl and the police cars that crawled up and down the back streets, peering into our white stucco cocoon wishing they were with us BySa mue lWa g a nWa t s o n ‘ Wh i t es t u c c od r e a mi n g ’

Vocabul ar y Stucco:

fine plaster used for coating wall surfaces

Umbilical: Dreamtime:

relating to the navel or umbilical cord for Australian Aboriginal people, it represents the time when the Ancestral Spirits created life and geographic formations and sites

Acknowledgement: Samuel Wagan Watson, ‘White stucco dreaming’, Smoke Encrypted Whispers, University of Queensland Press, 2004. (Text reproduced with permission of author.) Accessed 13:54 June 2, 2020. https://ozpoemaday.wordpress.com/category/aboriginal/

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Text 2 — Review ‘Survival: the first 3.8 billion years’

An illustration of the brain’s amygdalae (the pinkish purple structures at far left and far right), which have a role in non-conscious detection of threats and defensive behaviour. Credit: K H Fung/Science Photo Library

There is a tradition for scientists of a certain age to write a book tackling grand topics about the human condition. Recently, such tomes have included biologist E. O. Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence (2014) and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order of Things (2017). In these ‘big picture’ studies, scientists stretch beyond their areas of expertise to try to answer the question of what it means to be human. Psychologists become physiologists. Biologists become psychologists. Neuroscientists become anthropologists. And everyone’s a philosopher. The Deep History of Ourselves, neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux’s latest book, sits within this tradition. The book lays out a bold extension of his decadeslong scientific journey in the study of survival behaviours in humans and other mammals. LeDoux, an academic at New York University in New York City, is best known for his research on fear, and for carefully mapping the brain circuit centred on the amygdala — a knot of neurons in the medial temporal lobe. The amygdala, he showed, has a crucial role in non-conscious, defensive behaviour responses such as freezing or fleeing. His conclusion, based on the assumption that all mammalian amygdala circuits are structurally similar, was that all mammals (including humans) share these responses. He described this work in The Emotional Brain (1996).

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In the meantime, the amygdala circuit was referred to as the ‘fear circuit’. This became problematic. The mislabelling, LeDoux realized, had fuelled a misconception: that humans and other mammals share the conscious experience of fear (that is, the feeling of fear), not just non-conscious, defensive behaviours. In fact, he has long argued that, on evidence, the amygdala circuit is not sufficient, and might not be necessary, for feeling fear; that role, he suggests, is filled by parts of the prefrontal cortex involved in working memory. To deal with these confusions, LeDoux recast amygdala circuits as ‘survival circuits’ that give rise to survival-related behaviours such as defence, eating, temperature regulation and reproduction. And he reserved the term ‘fear’ only for the conscious experience of fear. This new view was outlined in his book Anxious (2015). In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux takes the next step. He proposes an entire taxonomy of survival behaviours and their putative neural circuits. These behaviours range from obligatory reflexes (such as being startled by a loud noise) to more flexible, goal-directed actions (such as anticipating and avoiding a possible threat). The book is an epic tale, tracing the evolution of survival behaviours from the dawn of life on Earth 3.8 billion years ago, to the development of the human brain’s capacity for consciousness, language and culture. By Lisa Feldman Barrett Vocabul ar y Prefrontal cortex:

the cerebral cortex covering the front part of the frontal lobe

Putative: neural circuits:

generally considered or reputed to be a population of neurons interconnected by synapses to carry out a specific function when activated

Acknowledgement: Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘Survival: the first 3.8 billion years’, Nature, Vol 572, pp. 437-438, August 20, 2019. (Text reproduced with permission of author.) Accessed 12:47 June 2, 2020. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02475-x

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Text 3 — Short story extract Miracles The Hartley girl was gone for twenty-four hours. Never turned up at the school, didn’t come home, a search out all night, police, everything. They were lining up the bus drivers for interviews when she showed up at her house for breakfast, apparently unharmed, and nicely fitted out in a tweed skirt, cream cotton blouse and sensible shoes. Nobody knew where she had got these items. The shoes were well worn in. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told her parents. ‘I feel absolutely fine.’ She found work in the library. When anyone asked her about it, her smile was a little watered down, perhaps, but it was still there, bright enough. It was Phoebe Hartley who began to use the word ‘taken’ to describe her situation, to excuse her absence from history and her lack of paperwork. The others picked it up from her. Deirdre didn’t like it. But Phoebe Hartley was such a positive girl, it would have been cruel to test her optimistic nature with too many questions, just as it was hard to stop thinking of her as a girl, even now that she was nearly forty. After the Hartley girl, there was little Suzie from the Chinese restaurant who was only three before she was nineteen overnight. Suzie made a pretty waitress, and was so calm and at peace with her transformation that half the town developed unexpected cravings for gong bao chicken and the little pancakes Mrs Chu served sliced into segments and hot enough to burn your mouth. Harry, who had kept his paper route, soon started carrying flowers on his bicycle, courting her, and her parents somehow accepted this, even grew quickly fond of him, because the two of them seemed to fit together so easily; it was as though they already shared a history. He learned to say hello and ask after the health of Suzie’s grandmother in terribly accented Cantonese. Suzie’s parents had been slow to start a family, and each of them had sometimes privately regretted their delay. The business had needed a great deal of their attention. But now the prospect of early grandchildren seemed like justice. All the children who were affected had the same calm, the same ability to reassure. And after half-a-dozen had been returned, their blood tests and examinations revealing an unblemished wellbeing, a clean slip through time, everybody became used to them. They were well-adjusted, happy people, kind to us all, ready to make a contribution. It was very doubtful that our own hands would have moulded them into better people. Surely they could be no more readied for the world of responsibilities into which they were suddenly thrust? Indeed the results were so impressive that some new families began to move into the district, particularly those with multiple school-aged children. They didn’t announce why they’d come but if you took them aside they would often admit that a third pair of hands at home, a third income, could really make a difference.

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‘If only you’d be taken,’ exhausted parents would tell their screaming twoyear-olds, only half in jest. Deirdre overheard them in the park and found it upsetting, but she would never be the one to make a fuss. By Jennifer Mills ‘Miracles’ Acknowledgement: Jennifer Mills, ‘Miracles’, Maxine Beneba Clarke (ed.), The Best Australian Stories 2017, iBooks. Black Inc, 2017, pp. 81–84. (Extract reproduced with permission of author.)

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Text 4 — Short story extract Obsolescence

Photo by Chirag Shah https://www.flickr.com/photos/60602206@N00/2359234859/

I am implementing the algorithms for a new valve regulator subsystem. The old subsystem has been identified as sub-optimal in its regulation of hydraulic pressure. Therefore, it is obsolete. When a system is obsolete, it must be replaced. It is an important task, so I must not make any mistakes. That is why I am in the office at 6:15am. Early in the morning is the time of day when I can attain the highest level of productivity. The second hand of the clock scrapes against the minute hand as it passes. 93 employees work on my floor. By 9:30am I will know if there are still 93 or only 92. When all my colleagues are here, some of them chat. I try not to get distracted, but sometimes it is difficult. At those times I listen to a CD on my headphones. In my desk drawer there are three CDs. I play each in turn so they don’t become boring. My favourite has a man and a woman standing back-toback on the cover. They are both glamorous and the man is wearing sunglasses. The woman is leaning back with her head against the man’s shoulder. Because she is shorter than him, the cover is slightly asymmetrical. When I put it on my desk, I like to turn it just a tiny bit to compensate. The music is exciting and sometimes when I listen to it, I tap my foot. There is no need to listen to music now, because there is no one here and no conversations. The people in the marketing department are the worst for having loud conversations. They speak on their mobile phones, and I can tell that they are making personal calls even during work hours. This is against policy. Some

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Text 4 continues on page 9 of them have more senior positions at the company than mine. It would be inappropriate for me to tell them to stop. Because I don’t tell them, the words clutter on my tongue and I have trouble thinking. I have trouble maintaining the high standard of efficiency that is expected of all employees. That is when I put on my headphones. There is a clicking noise from the kitchen that I recognise as the sound that the electric kettle makes when the water has reached boiling point. I had switched on the kettle so that I could make myself some tea. I drink tea because it helps me to concentrate. I get up from my desk and stretch my arms above my head. I have been sitting still for 34 minutes and my neck is stiff. There is a closed-circuit television camera on the other side of the office. I am smiling at the camera because a smile can lighten up the day of the people around me. Although there is no one physically present, the security guard at the desk downstairs might be watching me on his monitor. It changes view every 30 seconds. Since there are 30 floors, and one camera on each floor, the 30 seconds in which I am shown on the screen occurs every 15 minutes. It is now the time when I will be visible on the screen, for another five seconds. I continue smiling for five seconds. Then I go to the kitchen and choose my second-favourite mug. I prefer it over the others available because it is the largest, and therefore requires refilling less often. My favourite mug, which is missing from the cupboard, is not quite as large, but tapers at the brim. This design, by reducing the tea’s surface area, keeps it warm for longer. I pour boiling water into my second-favourite mug, and wait 10 seconds before taking the tea bag out again. When I add the milk it forms an oily pattern on the surface. I stir the tea to remove the oily pattern. After I remove the spoon, the tea continues to spin, and the spiral formation of the tea’s surface is like a whirlpool. I remove a fruit fly that has been submerged in the tea. The fruit fly must have seen the tea rising on all sides, and then it was too late and it drowned. By Joshua Mostafa Extract from ‘Obsolescence’ Vocabul ar y Obsolescence: Obsolete:

the process of becoming outdated and no longer used outdated, no longer used

Algorithm:

a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, usually related to a computer

Subsystem: Sub-optimal: Hydraulic:

a self-contained system within a larger system of less than the highest standard relating to a liquid moving in a confined space under pressure

Acknowledgement: Joshua Mostafa, ‘Obsolescence, Litro Magazine, March 3, 2013. (Extract reproduced with permission of author.) Accessed 12:22 June 23 2020. https://www.litro.co.uk/2013/03/obsolescence/

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