Đề thi HSG lớp 12 môn Anh Tỉnh Nghệ An năm 2026

Hungry Pop stars

Valerie Jones runs a company called Peanuts whose job is to look after pop stars and pop groups when they go on tour. She is the person who feeds the stars, and she's been doing it for the past ten years.

When the stars are playing at a festival, Valerie may have to cook for up to a thousand people, which includes all the crew and the people who work backstage. She erects a marquee, a huge tent, and the food is served buffet style from a central serving area. She has to cater for different tastes, so there are normally four or more choices of menu. She also has to look after people who may be on a special diet or some singers who don't eat dairy food before a concert.

She drives an enormous truck full of kitchen equipment and hires at least three walk-in refrigerators, a dishwashing unit, and portable cabins which act as storerooms and offices.

All the bands have to queue up to be served, and everyone has to have a meal ticket. The stars are usually more relaxed when they are eating as no one is bothering them for autographs, although Valerie says that sometimes the security men and the stars' managers are more trouble than the stars themselves.

There are certain things which she always has to keep in stock, like herbal teas and her own particular mixture of honey, lemon and ginger, which singers like to keep in flasks on stage with them when they're singing. Years ago bands used to drink quite a lot of alcohol, but these days they're much healthier. Most bands drink fresh fruit juice and prefer to eat salads.

A lot of people in the bands are quite young, and they're not used to very expensive food, so Valerie prepares plain food unless a band sends her a 'rider'. This is a list of special requirements. When people are tired, unwell or homesick, they like to have familiar 'comfort' food, so she keeps a stock of people's requirements just in case. As a result of all this, Valerie says she has become an expert shopper and in less than an hour in a supermarket she can spend £1000.

A lot of bands won't eat before a concert because they're too nervous, so Valerie and her staff can end up working very long hours as they have to be around to provide what people want at two or three in the morning. One thing Valerie has noticed is that the madder a band is on stage, the more normal they are when they are off it. She says she is amazed at the change in behaviour. A really wild singer can turn out to be really quiet and polite off stage.

NON-PLACES AND THE LOGIC OF SUPERMODERNITY

Section A

Modern mobility has changed not only how far people travel but also the kinds of spaces in which everyday life takes place. Anthropologists have traditionally been interested in places that acquire meaning through memory, social relationships and shared identity. A village square, a neighbourhood market or a family home matters partly because people attach stories and relationships to it. By contrast, many environments associated with contemporary life are designed less for belonging than for circulation. Airports, motorway service areas, shopping complexes and high-speed transport systems are used by large numbers of people, yet they rarely ask those users to become part of a local social world. Such environments have been described as "non-places". Their defining feature is not that they are literally empty of meaning, but that whatever meaning they possess is weakly connected to local history or long-term social attachment. They are built above all to move, process and temporarily accommodate people.

Section B

The individual entering a non-place does not arrive entirely without identity. Rather, identity is temporarily reorganised according to the rules of the environment. A passenger becomes recognisable through a passport and boarding pass, a driver through a toll ticket, and a customer through the ability to pay. What matters is not who the person is in the broader social sense, but whether they can provide the evidence required to participate in the immediate transaction. Once this requirement has been met, personal history becomes largely irrelevant. The traveller is treated as one member of a category: passenger, customer, visitor or user. This can produce an unexpected sense of freedom. The individual is temporarily relieved of many social expectations attached to family, profession or community. Yet that freedom is conditional. It lasts only while the person remains inside the system and continues to satisfy its formal requirements.

Section C

Communication in such spaces is also unusual. In a traditional social setting, meaning is often negotiated through conversation, gesture and shared knowledge. In non-places, much of this interpersonal exchange is replaced by standardised instructions. Screens announce departures, recorded voices issue warnings, arrows direct movement, and pictograms indicate what users may or may not do. These messages are designed to be understood by strangers who share neither language nor background. Their efficiency lies precisely in reducing the need for discussion. Even information about the surrounding region may be encountered in this indirect form. A driver may learn that a historic town or landscape lies nearby from a motorway sign, without ever leaving the road or speaking to anyone who lives there. Local difference is therefore acknowledged, but at a distance, translated into a form that can be consumed quickly by people passing through.

Section D

Non-places also change the way time is experienced. Traditional places often connect present activity with memories of what happened there before. By contrast, the traveller in an airport lounge or railway terminal is usually concerned with an immediate sequence of departures, delays and connections. Time becomes practical and measurable. The departure board, the gate number and the countdown to boarding matter more than the history of the location itself. When elements of local culture appear, they are often presented as carefully selected images, displays or products that can be recognised instantly by an international public. In this sense, the past is not always absent from the non-place, but it is reorganised for present consumption. Meanwhile, standardised shops, signs and routines can make distant cities feel unexpectedly similar. The traveller may move across thousands of kilometres while remaining inside environments governed by almost identical rhythms.

Section E

The social effect is equally paradoxical. Non-places gather large numbers of people without necessarily creating a community among them. Travellers sit beside one another, queue together and move through the same corridors, but these shared activities rarely develop into lasting social relationships. In fact, smooth operation often depends on people limiting contact. They respect queues, follow marked routes, avoid obstructing others and maintain a degree of personal distance. The result is neither complete isolation nor genuine collective life. Instead, people occupy the same environment while pursuing separate purposes. A crowded terminal can therefore produce a peculiar form of solitude. The individual is surrounded by others yet connected to them only through temporary rules and parallel movement. Physical closeness, in other words, does not automatically create social belonging.

Section F

It would be misleading, however, to treat non-places simply as mistakes that could be corrected by returning to an imagined past. Large-scale mobility and global commerce make such environments difficult to avoid. The more useful task is to understand how they organise behaviour and shape perception. This requires attention not only from architects and planners but also from the people who use these spaces. Once individuals become aware of how signs, layouts and routines direct their actions, they may be better able to decide when to comply automatically and when to create more personal forms of engagement. A brief conversation with a stranger, an unplanned pause or a deliberate interest in the surrounding locality will not transform an airport into a village square. Nor is that necessarily the aim. The challenge is to recognise that even highly regulated environments leave some room for human agency. Understanding the logic of the non-place may therefore be the first step towards living within it without allowing its logic to determine the whole of one's experience.

THE ILLUSION OF THE RATIONAL ACTOR

A. The Cognitive Psychologist

One of the most persistent myths about decision-making is that people know what things are worth in absolute terms. In reality, judgement is highly comparative. The attractiveness of an option often depends on what happens to be placed beside it. A restaurant meal may seem reasonably priced next to a far more expensive one, while a salary can feel generous or disappointing depending on what colleagues earn. Context supplies the reference points from which value is constructed. Remove those comparisons and people are often surprisingly uncertain about what they prefer.

Equally revealing is what happens once a decision has been made. We are uncomfortable with the idea that our choices may have been arbitrary, emotionally driven or simply mistaken, so we tend to reconstruct the reasons behind them. The explanation often comes after the choice, not before it. Yet we experience this retrospective story as if it had guided us all along. In that sense, rationality is sometimes less the engine of decision-making than the narrator who arrives afterwards to explain where we have ended up.

B. The Behavioural Economist

Traditional economic models are useful partly because they simplify human behaviour, but difficulties arise when the simplification is mistaken for reality. The perfectly rational decision-maker of classical theory is assumed to process vast amounts of information, weigh alternatives consistently and resist temptation whenever doing so is in their long-term interest. Real people are considerably less impressive. Attention is limited, memory is fallible and self-control varies from one moment to the next.

Emotion further complicates the picture. Decisions made while calm may bear little resemblance to those made under anger, excitement, fear or exhaustion. A theory that treats such states as irrelevant noise misses forces that can dominate behaviour precisely when important choices are being made.

Nor is giving people more options always beneficial. Beyond a certain point, additional choice creates cognitive work rather than freedom. Faced with dozens of retirement plans, insurance packages or nearly identical products, people may postpone choosing, rely on the default or avoid the decision altogether. More choice can therefore increase opportunity while simultaneously reducing our ability to act on it.

C. The Public Policy Expert

Every choice is made within some kind of environment, and environments are never entirely neutral. A cafeteria must place food somewhere, a website must display one option before another, and a pension scheme must decide what happens if an employee makes no active selection. These apparently small design decisions can have surprisingly large effects on behaviour. Putting fruit where it is easy to see, for example, may increase the likelihood that it is chosen even though every other food remains available.

This is the principle behind what is often called choice architecture. Its more controversial application is the use of nudges in public policy. A nudge changes the context in which a decision is made rather than banning an option or imposing a substantial financial penalty. The ethical case for such interventions rests on preserving the individual's ability to choose otherwise. Automatic pension enrolment, for instance, may increase saving, but employees can still opt out. The aim is not to remove freedom but to design situations in which predictable human weaknesses are less likely to work against people's own longer-term interests.

D. The Neuroscientist

People are poor forecasters of their own future behaviour, particularly when their present physical or emotional state differs from the state in which a future decision will be made. Someone planning a diet after breakfast may sincerely believe that resisting dessert that evening will be easy. A person calmly deciding to save money may underestimate the appeal of an impulsive purchase when excitement takes over. Psychologists refer to this as a hot-cold empathy gap: when we are in a relatively calm state, we struggle to imagine how strongly hunger, anger, fear or desire will later affect us.

The problem is not simple hypocrisy. The earlier intention may have been completely genuine. What is unreliable is our prediction of the future self who will have to carry it out. Recognising this systematic blind spot can lead to more realistic strategies. People may remove temptations in advance, automate savings or make commitments that become difficult to reverse. Such devices may look like restrictions, but they can help present intentions survive future moments of weakness.

E. The Organisational Sociologist

Not every human relationship works according to market logic. In many situations people cooperate because of trust, duty, guilt or a desire to be seen as considerate. Introducing money into such an arrangement can unexpectedly weaken these motives. A well-known example involves a childcare centre that began fining parents who collected their children late. Rather than reducing lateness, the fine made it easier to justify. What had previously felt like an obligation to other people could now be interpreted as a service for which one simply paid an additional charge. The financial rule did not strengthen the social norm; it displaced it.

Group influence provides another reminder that decisions are social as well as individual. People often adjust their opinions after seeing what others believe, even when they initially judged differently. This is not always irrational: following others can be useful when they possess information we lack. But conformity also has a cost. When disagreement threatens embarrassment or exclusion, people may suppress doubts they would otherwise express. A weak consensus can therefore become stronger simply because each individual assumes everyone else is more confident than they really are.

Write a letter of about 150 words.

The national education journal The Academic Outlook recently published an editorial arguing that schools should significantly reduce the time and funding devoted to extracurricular activities such as arts, sports and debate so that greater emphasis can be placed on academic subjects and examination performance.

The journal has invited students to submit letters for publication in response. Write a letter to the Editor responding to the editorial. In your letter, you should:

• explain how reducing extracurricular opportunities could affect students' well-being at school;
• suggest one or two practical ways for schools to maintain high academic standards while preserving valuable extracurricular activities;
• explain how a balanced education can equip young people with skills they will need in higher education and their future careers.

Dear Sir/Madam,
45 Le Duan Street, Truong Vinh Ward, Nghe An Province
...
Yours faithfully,
Nguyen Hai