HSK 7–9 Mock Test Paper 15

Source text · English

A modest household in Suzhou once kept a paper passbook in a drawer and treated every purchase as a small act of thrift. The couple, partners in both work and life, had learned to count every coin, to mend rather than discard, and to refuse what was merely showy. Their neighbours called them conservative; they called it self-reliance. When prices later rose and wages did not, that habit became less a choice than a long-term plan. They did not beg for help, nor did they boast. They simply stretched what they had, and waited. The difficulty is not that people have forgotten how to save. It is that the market now rewards display more loudly than restraint. Shop windows glitter; credit cards make tomorrow feel distant; a slight delay in delivery is treated as an insult. To live within means looks, to some, like a failure of nerve. Yet the couple’s ledger tells another story. What they refused to spend on glitter they put into a child’s education, a neighbour’s medical bill, and a small fund for the day when someone in the street would have nowhere to go. There is no romance in this. The days were dull, the rooms quiet, the conversations short. Still, when the city later grew restless and many households found themselves overstretched, the same couple remained steady. They had not won a prize. They had only kept a promise to themselves: not to confuse wanting with needing, and not to let a moment of panic undo years of care. That, in a noisy age, is a kind of quiet courage.

Source text · English

Professor Zhou was invited to Copenhagen to speak on how a city might keep its wetlands without turning them into a postcard. He did not bring a thick manual. He brought three photographs: a muddy path after rain, a stall at a morning market, and a child who had learned to be careful near the water rather than to fear it. The audience expected a layout of policies. What they heard was a warning against tidying too soon. A wetland that is fenced, labelled, and lit at night may look managed. It may also lose the slight disorder that lets birds nest and lets neighbours still cut a path to work. Conservation, he argued, is not a museum of stillness. It is a long negotiation among flooding, fishing, and the wish of families to live nearby without being driven out by rising rents. If planners only chase a percentage of “green cover” on a map, they will miss the people who already know where the ground is soft. The experiment, if it is to mean anything, must start with listening. Ask who still reads the tides, who mends the small boats, who minds the children after school. Then decide what to protect. A city that treats its wetland as a theme will soon find the theme empty. A city that treats it as a neighbour — sometimes inconvenient, always present — may yet keep both the water and the street. That, Zhou said, is the only layout worth defending.