Đề thi thử HSK 7–9 – Đề 6

Văn bản gốc · Tiếng Anh

There is a paradox running through the lives of connected people. We have never been so good at staying in touch, and never so bad at being present. A dinner table of four people and four phones is now a common still life of the age. We answer a message from a colleague in another city while the person across from us waits for a sentence we have not stopped typing. The technology that promised to abolish distance has quietly invented a new one: the last metre between the screen and the face. This is not a complaint against machines. Letters, telephone calls, and even telegrams all once arrived with the same promise and the same threat — presence at a distance, distance in presence. The difference now is speed, and speed has a way of turning a courtesy into an obligation. A reply that would once have waited a week for a stamp now demands a minute, an hour at most. We have begun to owe each other instant availability, and to forgive our own absence least of all. What such a bargain costs is harder to count. Attention is the raw material of friendship, and a friendship conducted in stolen half-moments is a friendship in instalments. We keep more acquaintances than any previous generation and can lean on fewer. The cure, if there is one, is less dramatic than the disease. A phone turned face down on a table is a small gesture, but the person opposite can read it the way sailors read a lighthouse: for this hour, you are the nearest place.

Văn bản gốc · Tiếng Anh

For most of the twentieth century, the old town's relationship with visitors was simple: they came, they photographed the river, and they left. The town kept nothing of them but litter and a memory of noise. Tourism arrived late to these streets and stayed briefly, and the town's economy grew in another direction entirely, out along the new industrial road where the land was flat and the taxes were low. That bargain has run out. The factories left as wages rose, and what the town has kept is precisely what it once sold short: the river, the stone steps worn shallow by four centuries of loading and unloading, the tea houses where nobody much happens. The planners' new hope is that visitors will now come slowly rather than briefly — to stay a week instead of an hour, to learn a craft from someone who still practices it, to return in a different season and bring a friend. The town deserves the experiment. What it must not do, in the rush to succeed, is tidy itself into a stage set. A working harbour that pretends to be a museum will fool nobody; a museum that remembers to keep working might still be worth living beside, for visitors and for the people who never left.