在第二部分開始前,考官會先說明題目要求,例如:“And now here’s your topic. I’d like you to talk about a news story that interested you.”
以福島核泄漏事件為例,考生在話題卡上寫下了下面這些單詞:
nuclear disaster (核災難) safety (安全)
radiation – vegetables – traces (輻射——蔬菜——痕跡)
contamination (污染) wind (風)
ocean (海洋) tsunami (海嘯)
media (媒體)
A news story that real ly impressed me in 2011 was about the nuclear disaster in Japan, in Fukushima. Um, I remember very clearly that night, when the news came out, I was at a bar in Shuang jing, and we started getting news. People were receiving news on their phones. Some people were trying… onto the net. They were going online, and I know my first reaction was to call my mum and to ask her to close the windows in the house and also I remember texting my best friend who has a young brother and, you know, sort of saying to her, “Hey, you need to check out what’s happening online. Maybe there’s a nuclear disaster happening in Japan.” And in fact here in China we were lucky. I mean the wind blew a lot of the, um, the radiation into the ocean rather than towards us here, but even in China they found there had been some traces of radiation in vegetables. But I mean it was an absolutely terrible disaster and the Japanese people were… Actually my dad has been to Sendai. It’s so heavily populated… The whole of Japan, it’s not a very big country in terms of landmass, but it’s got a big population, and people were overwhelmed. That tsunami, terrible… The farmers that lived in that area, I mean they couldn’t leave their land because otherwise who would feed their animals and so they just had to kind of sit there and hope for the best. So it was a terrible disaster, and of course it has made people all around the world much more cautious about nuclear power… Um, I saw on CCTV 9 that people in Europe are worried about nuclear power at the moment too, and they want to get rid of their nuclear reactors.
考官點評:
1) 注意news 和story 要連讀。
2) 表示要結合個人的經(jīng)歷來談論,增加了生動性及可信度。
3) 進行時態(tài)是中國學生時常忘記使用的時態(tài)。
4) 一句話中進行不同時態(tài)的轉(zhuǎn)換,可以起到放慢語速的作用。
5) you know 用來填充思維出現(xiàn)的短暫空白。
6) 不關注新聞就很難積累到radiation(放射)這樣的詞匯。
7) rather than 表示轉(zhuǎn)折,這種表達對中國學生來說比較新穎。
8) there be 句型和完成時態(tài)的結合,表示一種客觀事物已存在一段時間。
9) 表示程度嚴重的時候,heavily是比較合適的選擇。另外,“大雨”是heavy rain 而不是big rain。
10) overwhelm 表示受到了程度比較大的打擊,同時具有強調(diào)結果很嚴重的意味。
11) 說明該考生興趣面很廣,因為他不僅知道福島的情況,也知道其他國家對此事的反應。
考官總評:考生是如何應對這一話題的呢?他談到了自己對該事故的反應、災難對中國潛在的影響、災難對日本人的影響以及可能對歐洲產(chǎn)生的影響。要做到這些,考生平時就要積累大量的信息??忌窃诟u核事故發(fā)生后參加雅思口語考試的,所以對這個事件并不陌生,仍記得風將放射物吹入了海洋,并在中國的蔬菜中檢測出了核輻射物(traces of radiation 讓人印象深刻)。顯然考生也了解日本農(nóng)民處理災后影響的困境,以及災難對他們生活的影響。日本不是一個大國,仙臺市靠近福島,這都是常識,所以考生知道這一點??忌€意識到,考試中可能會問到歐洲核安全的問題,所以也進行了準備。