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Read Passage A and Passage B and then answer the questions which are printed on the Question Paper. Passage A

1 All of those broken bones in northern Japan, all of those broken lives and those broken homes prompt us to remember what in calmer times we invariably forget: the most stern and chilling of mantras holds, quite simply, that mankind inhabits this earth subject to geological consent, which can be withdrawn at any time.

2 For the Japanese, this consent was withdrawn with shocking suddenness at 2:46 p.m. on 11 March 2011. One moment, all were going about their day-to-day business and then the ground began to shake. At first, the shock was merely a much stronger and rather longer version of the tremors to which most Japanese are well accustomed. There came a stunned silence as there always does. However, minutes later, a low rumble from the east, the coastal waters off the northern Honshu vanished, sucked mysteriously out to sea. The rumbling continued. People began to spy a ragged white line on the horizon, and, with unimaginable ferocity, the line became clear as a wall of waves swept back inshore at great height. Seconds later, these Pacific Ocean waters hit the Japanese seawalls, surmounted them with careless ease and began to claw across the land beyond, in what would become a dispassionate and detached orgy of utter destruction. The sturdy buildings that survived the quake were ravaged by the waves. The three-storey wall of water dissolved coastal towns, dry-docked boats on the roofs of buildings and shuffled houses like playing cards. There were so many aftershocks that people stopped diving under tables. Those who made it safely to higher ground waited in the dark, in the cold, in lines that stretched for hours for water and food.

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3 Japan is at the junction of a web of tectonic plate boundaries that makes it more peculiarly vulnerable to seismic activities than almost anywhere else. Besides geography, topography also played an especially tragic role too – for it is an axiom known to all those who dwell by high-tsunami-risk coastlines that when the sea sucks back, you run inland and, if at all possible, you run uphill. However, in this corner of northeast Japan, with its wide plains of rice meadows and ideal factory sites and conveniently flat airport locations, there may well be a great deal of inland – but there is almost no uphill. So the reality is this: if a monstrous wave is chasing you inland at the speed of a jetliner, and if the flat terrain denies you any chance of sprinting to a hilltop to try to escape its wrath, then you cannot avoid the inevitable: it will catch you, it will drown you, and its forces will pulverise you out of all recognition, as a thing of utter insignificance.

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4 Unknown numbers of bodies lie amid the ashes. Yet however much people are in turmoil, few mope. Rationing of everything from petrol to water has generally been accepted with nary a complaint or raised voice; the idea is that everybody has to share the pain equally. Emergency centres, where more than 450,000 evacuees are being housed in stadiums or schools, are neatly organized, with people constructing origami boxes made of newspaper in which to nestle their shoes. This is a country where people do not wear shoes inside their homes, and the habit extends to the little islands of blankets that each evacuated family claims in their emergency shelter. Even though basic supplies are running low,

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lines at gas stations and grocery stores are orderly. There have been no reports of looting. In a society seen as the most stoic on earth, the closest thing to chaos was a man cutting in line.

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Passage B

1 How can I describe those several weeks beneath the ice-ridge? Nothing really important happened and yet all sorts of troubles short of total disaster seemed to have occurred. I believed we were still prepared to endure cold, exhaustion and danger and to strain our endurance to the limit, our prize being the highest peak in the Garhwal Himalayas and probably the fourth highest mountain in the world, also known as K3.

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2 Our motley crew of climbers established our base camp as close to the mountain as we could, less than half a mile from the tongue of its lower glacier, and made preparations for the ascent. Our food and equipment were unpacked, inspected, sorted, and then repacked in lighter loads for transportation to more advanced camps. We spent hours studying maps and charts, and more hours studying the mountain through the telescope and field glasses. We surveyed the glacier thoroughly and planned a route across it. Then came the backbreaking labour of moving up supplies and establishing a chain of camps.

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Camps 1 and 2 were set up on the glacier itself while Camp 3 was built at its upper end, as near as possible to the point where the great rocky backbone of K3 came out of the ice and started its sharp ascent. Camps established higher up would simply serve as shelters for a night or two. Hour after hour and day after day, the long file of men wound up and down the uneven glacier. We just left supplies of food and equipment there in Camps 1 and 2. We needed all the manpower available to work on the higher camps on the mountain. With our axes we cut countless thousands of steps in the gleaming walls of ice. We clung to handholds on the cliff face and strained at ropes until we thought our arms would come off. Storms swept down on us, battered us and passed. The wind increased, and the air grew steadily colder and more difficult to breathe. One morning two of the porters woke up with their feet frozen black; they had to be sent down to base camp. A short while later, one more developed an uncontrollable nosebleed and had to go down. However, the enemy we feared most did not return to attack us. No further tremors were felt.

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5 We were climbing from Camp 4 to 5, and an almost perpendicular ice wall had made it necessary for us to come out for a few yards on the exposed crest of the ridge. There were six of us in the party, roped together with the leader in front, myself second, and four porters in the rear. The ridge right here was free of snow, but knife-thin, and the rocks were covered with a smooth coat of ice. On either side the mountain dropped away 5000 feet straight down.

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6 Suddenly the quivers struck causing the last porter to slip. I heard the scrapping of boot nails behind me and turned to see him plunge sideways into space.

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There was a scream as the next porter was jerked off too. I remember trying desperately to dig into the ridge with my axe, realising as I did it that it would no more hold the weight of the falling men than would a pin stuck in the wall. Our leader shouted, “Jump!” As he said it, the rope went tight around my waist and I went flying after him into space on the opposite side of the ridge from the fallen porters. After me came the porter next behind me. By then the tremors had stopped but we feared an avalanche might have been triggered.

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7 I heard myself cry out, and saw the glacier below coming up at me. Then the rope jerked tight at my waist. I hung for a moment, then I swung in slowly to the side of the mountain. Above me the rope lay tight and motionless across the crest of the ridge. Our weight exactly balanced that of the men who had fallen on the far side. The leader’s voice came up from below. “You men on the other side!’ he shouted. “Start climbing slowly. We’re climbing, too.” In five minutes we had all regained the ridge. The porters and I sat gasping on the jagged rocks, our eyes closed, the sweat freezing on our faces. The leader carefully examined the rope that again hung loosely between us. “All right, men,” he said presently, “let’s get to the camp for a cup of tea.”

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