Đề thi thử HSK 7–9 – Đề 12

Văn bản gốc · Tiếng Anh

In Copenhagen a small workshop still cuts leather by hand, and the owner, who once studied with Zhou, likes to say that patience is the only capital he never borrowed. Visitors from Stuttgart and Jamaica pause at the window, then step inside as if they had found a quieter street. The pieces on the table are not souvenirs; they are tools that have outlived several owners and still carry a faint shine. He does not advertise. He does not need to. Word of mouth, he claims, is slower than any campaign and more durable than foam on a wave. What he fears is not competition but hurry. A city that renovates overnight can lose the grain of its own work. He has watched neighbours sell the shop, take a holiday, and return to find the street already speaking another language. The remedy he offers is unfashionable: keep the hours, keep the last, keep the conversation that starts with a complaint about rain and ends with a story about a teacher in Suzhou. Time, he says, is not a warehouse. You cannot stack it. You can only spend it in the same room as another person, until the work itself becomes the memory. That is why he still teaches one apprentice at a time. The young man learns to feel the hide before he cuts, to wait for the glue to set, to refuse a rush order that would spoil the stitch. If the shop ever closes, it will not be because the craft died. It will be because nobody was willing to sit still long enough to inherit it.

Văn bản gốc · Tiếng Anh

When the handbook for a new wetland park was first circulated, the committee in Suzhou argued for three days about a single sentence: whether visitors should be invited to wander or merely to look. The difference sounded small. It was not. To wander is to get muddy, to startle a bird, to learn that a path is not a corridor. To look is to stay on the boardwalk, take a photograph, and leave with the same layout of the city still in one's head. Zhou, who had been invited to speak, did not take a side at once. He told a story about a harbour in Jamaica where the tide still writes on the stones, and about a square in Stuttgart that was cleaned until nothing unexpected could happen. Both places, he said, had once been alive. Only one still was. The park, if it wished to last, would have to accept a little disorder: seasonal flooding, insects, the occasional visitor who ignores the sign. A wetland that never changes is a painting. A wetland that is allowed to work is a neighbour. The sentence that finally went into print was longer than anyone wanted and clearer than anyone expected. Guests are welcome to walk slowly, to ask, and to leave the place slightly different from the way they found it — provided they do not take the difference home in a bag. That, the committee decided, was as close to a promise as a park could make.