Đề thi thử HSK 7–9 – Đề 10

Văn bản gốc · Tiếng Anh

Patience used to be a public virtue. We waited in lines, waited for letters, waited for the rain to stop before we crossed a muddy street. Delay was not an insult; it was the weather of ordinary life. Today a three-second lag on a screen can make a person restless, as if the world itself had broken a promise. We have begun to treat waiting as a personal injury, and to measure our worth by how little we are asked to endure. Speed is not the enemy. A message that once took a week can now land in a breath, and that is a genuine gift for people who live far from home. The trouble starts when speed becomes the only language we trust. A slow reply looks like coldness; a pause looks like a slight. We fill every gap with noise so that nobody can accuse us of neglect, and then we wonder why our friendships feel thin. What we lose is not merely time. We lose the chance to let a thought ripen, to notice a neighbour, to sit with a difficulty until it shows its shape. A person who can wait is not idle. He is making room for something that cannot be forced. The small courage of the age may be this: to let a screen stay dark for an hour, and to believe that the person across the table is still worth the delay.

Văn bản gốc · Tiếng Anh

When a city invites a new harbour, it rarely invites only ships. It invites a new idea of time. Cargo that once waited for the tide now moves by timetable; warehouses that once stored grain for a season now turn over in a week. The old market, with its uneven stones and its habit of closing when the light failed, looks suddenly inefficient. Planners speak of throughput, of layout, of a long-term plan that will not be delayed by weather or by custom. Yet a harbour that forgets the people who live beside it will soon find itself empty of more than cargo. Street vendors, tea stalls, and the small workshops that repair nets do not appear in a shipping forecast, but they are what makes a landing place a neighbourhood. If the city tidies them away in the name of order, it may gain a clean waterfront and lose the reason anyone wished to stay. The wiser course is not to freeze the past, nor to sweep it aside. It is to let the new timetable and the old square share the same afternoon: ships that arrive on the hour, and a market that still knows how to wait for dusk. A city that can hold both kinds of time is not behind. It is simply large enough for more than one kind of life.