Cambridge International AS Level

ENGLISH GENERAL PAPER 8021/23

Paper 2 Comprehension May/June 2019

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Material for Section A

Introduction

The Jensens live in Robinia, a country in the northern hemisphere, and have not had a family
summer holiday together for several years. The family consists of Mr and Mrs Jensen and their
three children Peter, Thomas and Renate. They are a close-knit family and are keen to have one
last holiday together before Peter, the oldest child, starts a new job abroad. He has just finished
university having studied architecture for five years and he has not been home much during this
period.

The family have researched various holidays and have come up with three options:

Holiday X

A week-long activity holiday for all the family in the south of Robinia, staying near the coast in a
purpose-built activity centre; it is in a popular tourism destination. Activities include kayaking, raft
building, mountain biking and climbing as well as team-building exercises and ball sports.
Accommodation is basic but functional with en-suite bedrooms that can interconnect if necessary.
All food is provided with a menu offering both meat and vegetarian meals. The activities are
timetabled with free time scheduled into each day. A range of entertainment to suit the whole family
is provided in the evening. There is currently an offer of 25 per cent off the advertised price for a
family group of four or more. The family would travel by car.

Holiday Y

A week in a large four-bedroomed self-catering villa on the small island of Aguero, five hours’ flight
away to the south; the villa has its own pool and is located within a five-minute walk of a secluded
beach and a small town offering a choice of local restaurants, one supermarket and a daily market
for fresh produce. There are also bars and a small nightclub. Nearby attractions include ancient
ruins with a large amphitheatre. Cars, mopeds and bicycles can be hired to explore the island. The
villa is available during the week they want; it is in the premium price bracket for the time of year.
Flights and boat transfer to the island are included in the cost of the holiday.

Holiday Z

A week’s bed and breakfast in a luxury four-star hotel in a popular resort on the large island Marinus,
seven hours’ flight to the south east. The hotel has three swimming pools, a gym, a sauna, a spa
and several restaurants catering for a range of tastes including the local speciality of grilled lobster.
The resort boasts a large beach and also has many restaurants serving local and foreign cuisine.
Activities on the beach include volleyball, paragliding, sailing, windsurfing and powerboating. Flights
will need to be booked separately.

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Additional information

1 Mr Jensen likes the idea of supporting Robinia’s tourism industry but Mrs Jensen hankers
after a warm location and a bit of pampering following a hard year at work.

2 Aguero can only be reached by boat.

3 Mr Jensen is keen to keep within a reasonable budget for both accommodation and food.

4 Marinus has its own international airport.

5 Thomas suffers from travel sickness on all forms of transport.

6 Mr Jensen has an allergy to seafood.

7 Renate is dyslexic and therefore struggles with reading.

8 Peter thinks he has a fear of heights.

9 Mrs Jensen loves to relax in the sun and read as many books as she can.

10 Renate, the youngest at 13, is a keen swimmer and belongs to a swim team. She has a
strict training regime.

11 Thomas, who is 17, is interested in most sports, land- or water-based.

12 Peter’s university is located in the south of Robinia, a five-hour bus journey from home.

13 Thomas has recently passed his final school exams and will be going to university after the
summer.

14 Mrs Jensen is a middle manager in a large finance company and Mr Jensen is a teacher.

15 Mr Jensen likes to eat well on holiday and try out local restaurants.

16 Peter plays basketball for his university and rides a motorcycle.

17 The activity centre has its own heated pool.

18 Mrs Jensen is a vegetarian.

19 University fees in Robinia are very high.

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Material for Section B

Midnight and counting. An obituary from The Economist magazine.

Stanislav Petrov, ‘the man who saved the world’, was reported on 18 September to
have died on 19 May.

Over the years, Stanislav Petrov, had grown used to those telephone calls. Typically,
they would come at night or at the weekend, just as he was unwinding. He would lift
the receiver to the jaunty strains of ‘Arise, our mighty country!’ in his ear, and knew that 5
he had to get dressed, now, and get to the base. It was a pain. But in the nervy 1970s
and 1980s, when an American attack on the Soviet Union* might happen at any time,
an alert might be a practice, or might be the real thing. Either way, the motherland had
to be defended.

‘The base’ was the secret Serpukhov-15 early-warning facility, near Moscow. He had 10
worked there since graduation with top honours from the Radio-Technical College in
Kiev, monitoring surveillance by Oko satellites of the missile launch areas of the United
States. Its core was a room of 200 computer operators over which, when he was on
duty, he would preside from a glassed-in office. On one wall of the computer room, an
electronic world map lit up the American launch areas: six of them, with a total of 1000 15
missiles aimed at the Soviet Union. Just above his eye level, a wall’s-width screen
glowed a dull red. If nothing appeared on it, all was well.

He worked regular command shifts as well as the alerts, twice a month, just to keep in
training. Even his wife, Raisa, didn’t know what his work was. And, though this was
combat duty, not much was doing: by 22:00, after supper and a smoke, the team would 20
await the late-night orbit, all quiet.

26 September 1983 was different. At half past midnight, the red screen flashed ‘START’.
A missile was coming. The siren howled. In the room below, people leapt from their
seats. Everyone looked up at him. He had frozen. The message seemed odd: one
missile would not mean the all-out attack they were expecting. But how did he know? 25
Scared stiff, he roared at everyone to get back to work. When he managed to pick up
the phone, he reported a fault in the system. But then it saw a second missile. A third,
a fourth, a fifth: ‘probability of attack 100 %’. In ten minutes ground radar could confirm
it. But in twelve minutes the missiles, if they were coming, would hit Russia. High
command needed twelve minutes to organise their response. 30

His hands shaking, he called his superiors again. Again, he reported a malfunction, not
a strike. The officer at the other end was drunk, but somehow passed it on. Mr Petrov
then waited fifteen unbearable minutes. And nothing happened. There was indeed a
fault in the system: the satellite had been fooled by the sun’s rays reflecting off the
clouds high over North Dakota which had two launch areas. Every time he remembered 35
that moment when his call was proved right, his lean face would break into a smile of
relief.

His coolness had saved the world from a nuclear apocalypse. Or so other people said.
He knows that, at the time, he had not been cool. His chair had felt red-hot as a frying
pan, his legs limp as cotton. Some of his doubts were logical: the newness of the system 40
and the too-swift passage of the message through the thirty layers of verification he
had himself set up. Other doubts had been vaguer: a funny gut feeling, and a sense

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that he knew better than a machine. Even so, his decision to declare a false alarm was
a 50-50 guess, no better. Small wonder that, when it was over, he felt wrung out.

The fact that he was basically a scientist with a civilian training also influenced him. 45
Much as he had longed to be a fighter pilot like his father, a career soldier would probably
have passed on the message without thinking. There were safeguards against going
to war, or not, on the say-so of one man: other authorities had to be involved. But in
such febrile times, one rooster crowing was likely to set off all the others in the village.

As for those military cockerels, they were horribly embarrassed by what he had done. 50
So were all the renowned academicians who had spent billions devising the surveillance
system. They did not thank him for showing them up, for it was an old rule in Russia
that the subordinate must never be cleverer than the boss. Instead, they reprimanded
him for failing to fill in the operations log that night. Come on, he thought. A few months
later he left to take a job as a research engineer and to care for Raisa, who had cancer. 55
When she died, and money got tight, he mostly lived on potatoes and brewed tea from
herbs he picked in the park.

His story stayed secret until 1998. When it came out, he was celebrated in the West.
He toured America, starred in a documentary, was commended by the United Nations
and received the Dresden Peace Prize. Sometimes he enjoyed the fuss, but bitterness 60
over his treatment at home would surface all the same. He was often tetchy with
reporters who made their way to his small, grubby flat and sat in his bare kitchen with
the star-chart on the wall. He had done nothing, he would tell them, except his duty and
his job. And all he had to show for it was the TV his colleagues at Serpukhov-15 had
given him when he left and the telephone that had been installed, free, by the army 65
when he drew his pension. It had been cut off for non-payment, and never rang now.

*Soviet Union – a former country that existed from 1922 until 1991 and which included
modern day Russia and a number of neighbouring states.

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