Task 1: Your friend often feels nervous when speaking in front of a large group of people. What suggestions would you like to give to this friend of yours?
Sample
The following suggestions can be useful for someone who has stage fright. First, practice makes perfect. Don’t waste any chance to speak in public. He or she can start with an environment that’s not so intimidating, try giving a little talk at a family dinner first. When it’s time, move on to giving a presentation in class. Sooner or later, this person will be able to speaking in front of strangers. Second, be prepared for the speech. This means he or she should take the time write a draft, get the slides in order and rehears at the speech location if possible.
Task 2: When you take a trip, do you prefer to just look around, or do you prefer to take pictures and keep a journal on the trip.
Sample
I like taking lots of picture on my trips. First, I enjoy taking photos. It’s even more fun taking photos at a place that I’m new to. When I’m visiting a new city, I get to see colors, shapes and lines that are so different than what I’m familiar to, they inspire me to take better pictures. Second, our memory is very limited and unreliable. We will forget about the things we do and the people we meet in a week or so if we don’t have some kind of record. And these record can be shared with our friends and families too, it’s better to show them the highlights of our trip rather than just speak about them in words.
T3
Proposal:
The student letter suggests that the school should allow students to drink beverages in the library.
Reason1: students need coffee or tea to refresh their mind while reading in the library.
Reason2: they will do so carefully in order not to spill any drink.
The woman strongly disagrees with this opinion.
Reason1: there is a café not far away from the library. Taking a few minutes off from studying in the library and having a little walk is a good way to relax.
Reason2: Accidents do happen sometimes no matter how careful you are with the beverage, so in the long run, there will be stains on the book or damage to the computer.
T4
Information overload
Information overload occurs when the amount of information exceeds people’s processing capacity. People tend to receive a portion of information or ignore all of it.
The professor uses 2 examples to illustrate.
Example1: if a company posts to hire employees, usually the HR receives mountainous resumes. He could hardly read them, so he only picks out some of them to read.
Example2: A person is planning to go into chemistry research, so he asks many colleagues to recommend related literature to him. He receives many articles per week and he cannot spare any time to finish them all, as a result, he gives up reading them.
T5
Problem:
The girl is quite busy with her coursework and part-time job, she has no time to work out in the gym.
Solution1: ride to school instead of taking the bus.
But it takes much time and it’s really hot outside.
Solution2: Work out in the morning and then take a shower.
But the girl has to get up very early.
T6
The professor talks about two ways arctic animals used to adapt cold conditions.
The first one is basking.
For example, butterflies spread their wings to take in solar energy in order to keep warm.
The second one is freezing tolerance.
Even though the water in animals’ body will froze in winter, chemicals within their body will prevent from being damaged. When the temperature goes up, the ice will thaw and then the animals will be active to normal.