SECTION B
Essay
125 marks
A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.
WRITE IN
90 min
1,000–1,200 words
Reading the topic
The topic suggests that a smile can carry many meanings at once: warmth, politeness, embarrassment, sarcasm, power or concealed pain. The examiner expects an essay on the ambiguity of human expression, the gap between appearance and inner state, and its uses in personal life, art, work and diplomacy.
ThesisA smile is valuable precisely because it is ambiguous, letting people ease social life, hide pain or exercise power, so reading smiles wisely requires empathy rather than assumption.
Dimensions to cover
- 1Psychology: genuine and polite smiles involve different facial muscles, showing that a smile can be either felt or performed
- 2Workplace: service jobs demand constant smiling, a form of emotional labour that can mask exhaustion
- 3Mental health: people with depression often smile in public, so a cheerful face can hide a crisis
- 4Art: painters and poets have long used the smile to capture mystery and inner complexity
- 5Diplomacy and politics: smiles and handshakes for the camera can signal friendship while tensions continue underneath
- 6Culture: in many societies smiling expresses embarrassment or respect rather than joy, so cross-cultural reading is easily mistaken
Counter-view
- A counter is that the smile is humanity's most universal sign of friendliness, recognised across cultures, and calling it ambiguous is cynical. The essay should accept its universality while showing that its meaning depends on context, which is exactly why it can carry so many intentions
Open and close
- Open: Open with the code words sent after Pokhran in May 1974, 'The Buddha is smiling', and ask what kind of smile a nuclear test could possibly wear
- Close: Conclude that a mature society learns to look behind smiles without losing faith in them, reading them with empathy rather than suspicion
Where marks usually go
- Writing a feel-good essay on the benefits of smiling and ignoring the word 'ambiguities'
- Becoming wholly cynical and treating every smile as deceit, which misses the social value of courtesy
- Ignoring public life and limiting the essay to personal relationships
Examples that fit
- CaseLeonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is famous for a smile that seems to change with the viewer's angle, inviting endless interpretation.Musée du Louvre, Mona Lisa collection page
- HistoryIndia's first nuclear test at Pokhran in May 1974 was code-named 'Smiling Buddha', placing a symbol of peace on an act of military power.Indian nuclear programme histories; Bhabha Atomic Research Centre
- ThinkerArlie Hochschild showed how airline attendants were trained to smile as part of the job, coining the term emotional labour.The Managed Heart, Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983)
- ThinkerThe French physician Guillaume Duchenne found that a genuine smile involves the muscles around the eyes, while a polite smile uses only the mouth.The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, G.-B. Duchenne de Boulogne (1862)