Đề thi thử HSK 7–9 – Đề 8

Văn bản gốc · Tiếng Anh

Patience used to be a public virtue. People stood in line without staring at a glowing rectangle, and a delayed train was an inconvenience, not an insult. We have since trained ourselves to treat waiting as a personal injury. The same minute that once belonged to idle talk now feels stolen, and we fill it with whatever the screen will give us. Speed has become a habit of mind, and a habit of mind is harder to put down than a device. This is not nostalgia for a slower century. Letters were late, appointments were missed, and nobody called that era kind. What has changed is the story we tell ourselves about time: that every unused interval is waste, and that waste is a moral failure. We have begun to measure a day by how many tasks we can close, and to resent the hours that refuse to be closed — a meal that takes too long, a friend who talks in circles, a walk with no destination. The cost shows up in small places. We grow restless in rooms that used to feel restful, and we call that restlessness ambition. A conversation that cannot be summarised in a message is judged inefficient. If there is a remedy, it is not a grand programme. It is the willingness to let one hour remain unfinished, to sit with a person who has nothing urgent to report, and to admit that not every interval needs a purpose. Presence, after all, is also a kind of work.

Văn bản gốc · Tiếng Anh

A small harbour city once measured its luck by how many ships left before dawn. Cargo was the only language that mattered, and the people who lived along the waterfront learned not to look too long at the horizon. When the shipping lanes shifted, the warehouses emptied, and for a decade the city told itself a story of decline. Young people left for work elsewhere; those who stayed kept the lights on and waited for an industry that would not return. What returned instead was quieter. Artists rented the ground floors because the rent was low and the light was good. A handful of workshops opened, then a market on weekends, then a ferry that brought visitors who came to walk rather than to buy. The city did not become famous overnight, and that was its luck. Fame that arrives too fast tends to tidy a place into a postcard, and a postcard cannot feed the people who still live there in winter. The task now is to keep the harbour working without pretending it is a museum, and to welcome guests without turning the street into a stage. A city that remembers how to load a crate and how to host a stranger may still have a future. What it must not do is choose one and abandon the other. Both kinds of labour belong to the same waterfront, and both are worth keeping.