Sentosa island, which was in news recently, is located in
- (a)Singapore
- (b)China
- (c)Australia
- (d)Sri Lanka
Correct — A, Singapore. Sentosa is a resort island off the southern coast of Singapore's main island, separated from it by the channel of Keppel Harbour. It was in the news on 12 June 2018, three months before this paper, because the Capella hotel on Sentosa hosted the first-ever meeting between a serving President of the United States and a leader of North Korea — Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. Singapore was chosen partly because it maintains diplomatic relations with both countries and could guarantee security on a small, easily sealed island.
- (b)China — China is where the same summer's other headline diplomacy took place — the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit at Qingdao in June 2018 — which is probably why it is offered here. Sentosa is not Chinese territory.
- (c)Australia — Australia has no island of this name. The word is Malay, and the language itself points away from Australia and towards maritime South-East Asia.
- (d)Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka is the plausible South Asian guess for a small tropical island near a big trading port, but Sentosa is not among its islands.
Sentosa is a made place as much as a found one. It was called Pulau Blakang Mati in Malay — literally the island of death behind — and served as a British military post before independence. It was renamed Sentosa, from a Malay word for peace and tranquillity that traces back to the Sanskrit santosha, meaning contentment, and redeveloped from the 1970s into Singapore's principal resort island, with beaches, a cable car and later an integrated resort. Its size and the single causeway approach are exactly what made it usable for a summit.
Place-in-the-news items are best solved by the language of the name rather than by recall of the event. Sentosa is a Malay word, and the Malay-speaking world in this list is Singapore, so the answer follows even if the summit itself has been forgotten. It is worth noting what has changed since: the June 2018 Singapore summit was followed by a second meeting at Hanoi in February 2019 and a brief encounter at the Korean Demilitarized Zone later that year, and the denuclearisation talks it opened did not produce an agreement.
- Sentosa is an island off the southern coast of Singapore, separated from the main island by Keppel Harbour.
- It was formerly called Pulau Blakang Mati; the present name is Malay for peace and tranquillity, from the Sanskrit santosha.
- The Capella Singapore hotel on Sentosa hosted the North Korea–United States summit on 12 June 2018.
- That was the first meeting between a sitting United States President and a North Korean leader.
- Placing any small tropical island in Sri Lanka or Indonesia by reflex, without reading the name itself.
- Confusing the June 2018 Singapore summit with the Qingdao meeting of the same month, which was a different set of countries entirely.
- Assuming a resort island cannot be politically significant; Sentosa was a British military post before it was a resort.
Asked as a bare place-to-country item hung on an event three months before the exam.
No directly related past PYQ was found.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The 2018 meeting between the leaders of the United States and North Korea was held in
- (a)Hanoi
- (b)Singapore
- (c)Panmunjom
- (d)Geneva
Answer(b) Singapore — at the Capella hotel on Sentosa island on 12 June 2018; the follow-up meeting the next year was at Hanoi.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Singapore's main island is separated from the Malay peninsula by
- (a)the Palk Strait
- (b)the Johor Strait
- (c)the Sunda Strait
- (d)the Bass Strait
Answer(b) the Johor Strait — the narrow channel crossed by the causeway linking Singapore to Malaysia.