my father (he's 45 now) got A1 for literature in his O lvs. his
english was C5. in fact his english teacher was really really very
impressed (and shocked) that my father passed his english
paper.
i would say its about talent and hard work. if your foundation
in english is poor, well, work harder, memorize more. if your
foundation is great and you can understand literature very well,
you can afford to spend less effort. it's all about putting in the
appropriate amount of effort with regard to your amount of
talent.
I'm doing Chinese Studies now, and we do a lot of study on the
Theory of Literature. all i can say is, literature is literature,
regardless of which language it's in. At the O lvs, i took chinese
literature, and that was a hell lot of memorizing. in fact, the
memorizing is tougher than history's (no idea about geog, i never
took it). Because literature is all about studying abstract
concepts. it's very hard to understand literature fully at sec sch
level, all they want is for you to memorize. so well, to
summarize
1. my father worked DAMN hard at O lvs.
2. literature is all about memorizing abstract concepts
(alternatively, memorize all the model answers from your
teacher)
3. history/geog is about memorizing too, but what they teach is
less abstract (esp geog.)
hope that helped you