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Read the text below and answer Questions 1–3 on the question paper. TEXT 1 This text is from a Sunday Times article by Jeremy Clarkson on health and safety and holiday accidents. Splints, tick. Crutches, tick. Stuff health and safety, tick. Let the holiday begin Judging by the absence of traffic on London’s roads, you’re all currently on holiday, which means that fairly soon you will be overcome with an uncontrollable urge to injure yourself. Many of you will do this by going water-skiing. Others will choose to be towed behind a speedboat on an enormous banana. Well, you go right ahead but don’t come crying to me when you arrive home on crutches, or in a box, or with a bottom so full of water that you could double up as a fish tank. Water-skiing is like snow-skiing. Professionals make it look so easy that after a couple of bottles of wine you too think you could do it. But here’s the thing. It’s not easy and soon you will have a dislocated hip. Being on an enormous banana is very easy. So easy that after just a few moments you will decide to try to turn it over. Nobody does this when they are watching television at home, or when they are sitting in a restaurant. Nobody thinks: "I wonder if I can make this chair fall over?" But put them on an enormous banana and almost straight away they will start to rock violently from side to side until over they go. And then they are in a hospital with a head wound. What's really odd is that the need to try to turn the banana over becomes particularly irresistible when you are sharing the ride with your children. They're sitting there, bouncing up and down and squeaking with delight, and you're at the back, thinking that it'd be much better if you put them in a wheelchair for the rest of their lives. I was in Australia last week and every morning lots of people with Tarzan hair and ankle bracelets ran down the beach and leapt into the sea with their surfboards. Within an hour most of them were in a shark, and those who weren't were back on the beach with a skeleton that wasn't joined up any more. And I kept thinking to myself: "Why do you do this? Why spend a lovely sunny day putting yourself in harm's way?" If you keep going round the globe you eventually reach New Zealand. And here things are even worse because as soon as you are off the plane, you will feel compelled to jump 5 10 15 20 25 30

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Read the text below and answer Questions 13 on the question paper.

TEXT 1

This text is from a Sunday Times article by Jeremy Clarkson on health and safety and holiday accidents.

Splints, tick. Crutches, tick. Stuff health and safety, tick. Let the holiday begin

Judging by the absence of traffic on Londons roads, youre all currently on holiday, which means that fairly soon you will be overcome with an uncontrollable urge to injure yourself. Many of you will do this by going water-skiing. Others will choose to be towed behind a speedboat on an enormous banana.

Well, you go right ahead but dont come crying to me when you arrive home on crutches, or in a box, or with a bottom so full of water that you could double up as a fish tank.

Water-skiing is like snow-skiing. Professionals make it look so easy that after a couple of bottles of wine you too think you could do it. But heres the thing. Its not easy and soon you will have a dislocated hip.

Being on an enormous banana is very easy. So easy that after just a few moments you will decide to try to turn it over. Nobody does this when they are watching television at home, or when they are sitting in a restaurant.

Nobody thinks: "I wonder if I can make this chair fall over?" But put them on an enormous banana and almost straight away they will start to rock violently from side to side until over they go. And then they are in a hospital with a head wound.

What's really odd is that the need to try to turn the banana over becomes particularly irresistible when you are sharing the ride with your children. They're sitting there, bouncing up and down and squeaking with delight, and you're at the back, thinking that it'd be much better if you put them in a wheelchair for the rest of their lives.

I was in Australia last week and every morning lots of people with Tarzan hair and ankle bracelets ran down the beach and leapt into the sea with their surfboards.

Within an hour most of them were in a shark, and those who weren't were back on the beach with a skeleton that wasn't joined up any more.

And I kept thinking to myself: "Why do you do this? Why spend a lovely sunny day putting yourself in harm's way?" If you keep going round the globe you eventually reach New Zealand. And here things are even worse because as soon as you are off the plane, you will feel compelled to jump off a bridge, trusting that the organiser, who may or may not be a little bit stoned, has tied the bungee rope properly.

And if by some miracle you survive this ordeal by gravity, you'll climb into an enormous see-through ball and ask someone to push you off a cliff. It's extraordinary. You've sat in an aeroplane for more than two days to reach New Zealand and as soon as you get there you decide to become a paraplegic.

It's not just summer holidays either where we crave a spot of light paralysis for ourselves and our families.

On a weekend break in December many parents will take their children ice skating. It all sounds very idyllic: ruddy-faced kids whizzing about, mittens on strings, and the public-address system playing a selection of heart-warming carols. But do you know why they play carols at ice rinks? It's to mask the screams coming from the first-aid room.

Well, that's what it says on the door.

Because "first aid room" suggests it's full of nothing but a plump nurse with a cupboard full of sticking plasters and aspirin. But if you step through the door it's like going into the aftermath of an alien attack. There are limbless corpses everywhere and the walls are papered with flesh.

What's the matter with Monopoly? Or chess? Or if you want to get some fresh air, a spot of volleyball? Oh, and there's another thing.

Why does everyone these days want to do a parachute jump? If you want to raise money for charity, which is the usual impetus, why not sell jam or do a sponsored walk? Why jump out of an aeroplane? I have never jumped out of an aeroplane and I never will. I'm sure it's a rush, standing by the door, plucking up the courage to take one last step. But after that it will be a few seconds of pure terror with a choice of two possible outcomes. Either you end up back at the airfield where you started in one piece. Or you end up back at the airfield where you started with a broken ankle.

I definitely can't understand why someone who has jumped out of an aeroplane and not broken their ankle would want to do it again. Because that's like going to a casino and betting constantly on red. It's a statistical certainty, bound by the laws of probability, that one day you're going to lose.

And yet here we all are in the summer holidays, scattered to all four corners of the globe, water-skiing and jet-biking and trying our hands at stuff for which our office-bound minds are completely unprepared. And why? Why are we risking so much for a momentary thrill? Well, it's because of those signs in shopping centres that tell us the floor is slippery when wet. And it's because of George Osborne's high-visibility jacket. And it's because of labelling on food.

It's because we live our day-to-day lives in a big cotton-wool ball, with handrails to stop us falling over and new roundabouts to make sure we aren't knocked off our bicycles.

All this health and safety flies in the face of everything that makes us human -- our playfulness, our need to explore strange new worlds and cut our knees occasionally.

Which is why, for two glorious weeks every year, we can fling off our socks and ride motorcycles in shorts and drink too much alcohol and eat too much food. Will we get a fatty liver and a broken leg as a result? Yup. Do we care? Nope.

Because soon we will be back at the airport, not being allowed to take any liquids on the plane in case we moisturise the pilot to death.

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Read the text below and answer Questions 47 on the question paper.

TEXT 2

Charlie Brooker is a journalist for the Guardian newspaper. In this extract from an article, he writes about his experience of leaving London to visit Crete on holiday.

I'm not really here. That is, I'm not really here in Britain, because I'm on holiday at the moment. In Crete, to be precise, where everything's considerably warmer and sunnier and more congenial than jolly old London which, from my current perspective, consists almost entirely of looming grey building-shaped objects constructed from bin lids and misery.

Still, don't be jealous. It's not like I'm lolling around in the sun doing nothing. I'm sitting indoors typing this. Then I'm going to loll around in the sun doing nothing. Before you hurl your newspaper across your dingy tube carriage in disgust, remember I'm allowed to do nothing because I'm on holiday - under doctor's orders to relax, no less - but still, it makes me uncomfortable.

I guess I'm supposed to lie back and let go, but in the absence of anything to worry about I quickly start to lose all sense of my own identity, like a lumberjack waking up to discover all the trees in the world built a space rocket and left for another galaxy during the night. Worries hold me together. But the sky's blue, the sea's clear and the sun's beating down: worries are hard to find and even harder to hold on to.

I tried worrying about tanning, for starters. I don't tan. Different bits of my body react to the sun in different ways, none of them conventionally sexy. So there's no point in worrying about tans. Damn.

I could worry about stepping on a sea urchin. I was flipping through the guide book on the plane, and apparently sea urchins are a) everywhere and b) painful. Tread on one and you'll need a doctor to tease out the spikes. Never mind that I'm less likely to step on a sea urchin and get a spike in my foot in Crete than trip over a dead neighbour and get a syringe in my eye in London: it's an exotic new threat, and I'm alert to it. Or rather I was. For the first few days I watched my step, dipping my toe into the surf as though the sea itself might bite me. Now I've forgotten all about it.

Last night I barbecued some freshly caught fish beneath the night sky. It was a gas-operated barbecue for one thing, so I kicked off by worrying about the canister suddenly exploding and blasting the entire front of my body off. Then there was the fish itself: a pointy, sharky sort of creature with accusing eyes and tiny rows of sharpened doll's teeth. It was so long it wouldn't fit properly over the coals, which was absolutely brilliant since it meant I got to worry about whether it was properly cooked or not. Maybe I'd end up poisoned, clutching at my throat and trying to explain to a Greek doctor who didn't speak a word of English that I'd fallen victim to some underdone poisonous barracuda. Sadly, that didn't happen. Didn't even choke on any bones. Instead I ate the fish, and the fish was nice. This will never do.

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SECTION A Reading

Read Text 1. Then answer Questions 13.

You should spend about 1 hour 15 minutes on the WHOLE of Section A (Questions 17).

Write your answers in the spaces provided.

1. In lines 35-37, identify two things the writer suggests can be found in first aid rooms.

1 ...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

2 .......................................................................................................