Easily build examples in A Levels for a better result (General Paper or H2 History)

Previously, we talked about why your GP essays are not answering the questions. Now, we’re going to talk about how we can build examples in A Levels. 

Having knowledge can be great, but if you do not know how to apply it in your essays, then you would not be able to produce an essay that you want to meet your own standards, which should be high! To achieve this, you need two things:

1. Knowing how to build examples in A Levels;
2. Deepen your understanding of said examples.

Step 1: How to build examples in A Levels

The specifics on how to build examples really differ between subjects, but the fundamental rule stays the same: You would want to use structures. Underpinning these structures are concepts. Luckily, in school, your teachers would have already done this in accordance to the subject syllabus. Under the syllabuses, you would learn different topics with different structures and concepts.

So ,for example, in General Paper, you would learn about the topic of the environment. You would learn some of the big talking points: what are the impacts of it, why it’s so important to care, what are the causes of the environmental problems, etc. For each topic, how the teachers carry out their teaching really depends on their own pedagogies, but in Singapore, typically, we boil them down to concepts and help you engage with the material through authentic, real world examples.

But the thing is, you first need your basic structures in place. In mathematics, you learn the basic functions of numbers at primary school and the rules that govern the way these numbers interact, before moving on to the devil’s spawn that is calculus. It’s the same thing with any argumentative essays. Before you even obtain the ability to communicate your arguments in accordance to the topical concepts, you need to first know the concepts! Using the aforementioned example of the environment, you would learn concepts like overexploitation of resources, consumerist culture, etc. From there, you would then have space to analyse the issues therein.

Such structures differ between subjects, but let’s use economics as an example. In economics, you learn basic definitions, things you’d have to memorise. In learning microeconomics, in Singapore, we typically first touch on the concept of scarcity. Because economics is fundamentally a subject that explains base decision making behaviours, we need to know what drives humans.

With the understanding that we have finite resources, human beings are presented with choices. Once a choice is made, depending on a variety of other factors that influence those choices like Need vs Want, amount of disposable income, etc., that results in opportunity costs. From there, you can then go on to better under why do certain goods have higher demand than others, and why human beings make certain decisions. That then leads to type of goods, elasticity of demand, impacts of consumption (which can lead to market failure), so on and so forth.

From there, we can start building examples by applying these concepts to wider institutions or to even individuals. If we look at it simply, every day, humans have a choice. We can go to work, go to school, or just take a day off. Now, for us, obviously we would want the latter, but we know that in doing s,o we incur the opportunity costs of losing our incomes or losing the chance to learn, just so we can derive the satisfaction from that day off. Once you have a grasp of this, then you would have achieved conceptual understanding, then the better you would be able to build examples in A levels.

Because from here, your next step is then to look for examples of people doing this, be it in the form of real life individuals making these choices, or statistics, or what-have-yous. When you apply it to wider institutions like the government, for instance, the government has perhaps the choice of spending its annual budget on improving infrastructure, or improving the education system, or investing in social programmes. They obviously would have a team of economists to do this, but the decision stems from a lack of resources and a mindfulness of opportunity costs.

For example, in Singapore, the government makes such decisions and therefore opportunity costs annually. Budget 2025 emphasises continued financial support for the individual and household, defraying expenditures, with a focus on strengthening the nuclear family.

In short, you have structures underpinned by concepts like: opportunity costs, which is the next best alternative forgone, come from scarcity. Then you look for examples of scarcity that create opportunity costs!

Deepening your understanding

Now, deepening your understanding isn’t as straightforward, since once we begin to go down the rabbit hole of each subject, there are so many nuances to them. That’s why we have specialisation in higher learning! We take degrees for specific subjects to learn them more. 

But at the JC or secondary level, while we need not go that deep, we still have to consider the ideas forthwith in order to develop our critical thinking skills (and thus build examples in A Levels).

For example, in General Paper, your teachers would prepare copious amounts of reading material for you. Let’s say, for instance, we revisit the topic of the environment. We learn concepts like why it’s important to care about it. Through that concept, we learn basic examples like the impacts of environmental degradation, like climate change and all its ensuing impacts on our ecosystems and natural environment, as well as the implications of it on our ways of life.

A specific example of this would be shark’s fin; why do we want to stop this? Because the overfishing of sharks – not to mention the entirely wasteful and downright inhumane hunting practices – would have profound impacts on our food web and ecosystems!

But this is where we can begin investigating by asking some simple and rudimentary questions – why does this practice exist? Who is responsible for this? How do we mitigate this problem? What are the challenges of dealing with these problems? Simple answers would be: 

1. Why does it exist? Culture. There are cultural underpinnings that drive such practices, most notably in the form of shark fin’s soup.

2. Who is responsible? Businesses that profit from it, governments not cracking down enough, consumer demand driving it, etc. You can then look for specific examples of each of these things.

3. How do we mitigate this problem? We can do it through regulation, banning shark fishing, cracking down, etc.

4. What are the challenges? Regulations require resources and they don’t solve the root of the problem. We thus need to tackle the cultural element of it, which is the key driver to the creation of demand for it in the first place. And then comes the next few questions - how?

As we answer each question, we start to build more and more examples that are intrinsically tied to one another, and that’s when you build a solid, holistic understanding of the case study and therefore, how you build examples in A Levels. The more topics for which you do this, not only would you have more knowledge, but you would also gain a much deeper understanding of the things you read about on the news.

So, on your own, what can you do? The steps are very straight forward. 

1. Seek help from your teachers and clarify the concepts that you have learned in school if you don’t understand them.
2. Build examples of the simple concepts first.
3. Ask questions, think about the issues with which you are engaging, and look for answers and examples to those questions.
4. Consult your teachers or even me (in a tuition setting) to clarify your thoughts.
5. The final step is then to read widely and reverse engineer real life case studies that you see. But you should only do this when you are absolutely confident of your basic concepts. You wouldn’t ask a kid to jump straight into differential equations if they haven’t even learn how to multiply 12 times 12.

I won’t lie, this would take a lot of effort and time on your part. Your teachers would have prepared the necessary materials for you, so that’s half the job done, but you still need to internalise it by building your own understanding. So that’s how you build examples in A Levels. 

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We at The Discourse Education offer GP tuition lessons and H2 History tuition lessons for those who need more help. We won’t claim we are the best, but we will certainly do our best to help you. If you need help, do not hesitate to contact us for a free trial!

Featured Image by Danist Soh on Unsplash