Speaking Part 2 你達成的目標 Band 7+ 範答

Describe a goal that you achieved.

You should say:

• what the goal was
• when you set it
• how you achieved it
• and explain how you felt when you achieved it.

¹ A goal I set myself and eventually managed to achieve was running a half-marathon in under two hours — twenty-one kilometres at a sustained pace, which doesn't sound dramatic but, for someone who genuinely couldn't run for a bus a few years ago, was a real stretch. ² I set the goal at the start of 2023, after spending an entire pandemic year quietly losing fitness, and I gave myself eleven months to get there.

³ I followed a beginner's training plan I found online — three runs a week, increasing the long run by no more than ten per cent each week, with a recovery week every fourth week. ⁴ The first month was honestly demoralising; I could barely manage three kilometres without stopping, and I remember seriously considering quitting on at least four separate occasions.

⁵ Things shifted around month three. ⁶ I'd built up to comfortable ten-kilometre Sunday runs, and for the first time in my adult life I started to look forward to the next one rather than dread it. ⁷ By month seven I was hitting fifteen kilometres regularly, and I actually signed up for a race in Taipei the following November to give myself a hard deadline.

⁸ Race day itself was strange — much harder than I'd prepared for emotionally, but mechanically simpler than I'd feared. ⁹ I hit a real low patch around kilometre sixteen where every part of me wanted to walk, but I'd promised myself before the start that I wouldn't, and I held on. ¹⁰ I crossed the line at one hour fifty-four.

¹¹ What surprised me wasn't the time itself — it was the realisation that the goal had basically already been achieved by month four, when I'd quietly become someone who runs three times a week. ¹² The race was just the receipt.

A goal I'm proud of achieving was getting into a postgraduate programme in design at a British university. I'd set the goal in my final year of undergraduate, despite knowing my portfolio at the time wasn't really competitive enough.

A goal I set myself and surprisingly kept was quitting social media for an entire year. I made the decision on my twenty-fifth birthday, after realising I'd spent more hours on Instagram that year than on my actual hobbies combined.

A goal I achieved last year was saving enough money to buy my mother her first proper trip abroad — two weeks in Hokkaido for her sixtieth birthday. I'd set the goal eighteen months earlier and worked out I needed to set aside about eight thousand New Taiwan dollars a month to manage it.