Speaking Part 2 一個好笑的故事 Band 7+ 範答

Describe a funny story that someone told you, or that happened to you.

You should say:

• what the story is
• who was involved
• when it happened
• and explain why you find it funny.

¹ A funny story I genuinely don't mind retelling, even though I was the one humiliated in it, happened on my very first day at a new job in early 2022 — about thirty minutes into a remote welcome meeting with eight new colleagues and my new boss. ² I was working from my apartment in Taipei, and crucially, I was sharing the space with a deeply unimpressed three-year-old cat called Mochi.

³ Everyone had just finished introducing themselves, and the boss had asked me to share a few sentences about my background. ⁴ I'd taken a deep breath, started speaking, and was about ten seconds into a perfectly rehearsed introduction when Mochi — who had been silently judging me from the bookshelf — decided that this was the precise moment to climb directly onto my keyboard.

⁵ What none of us realised at the time was that he'd managed to land squarely on my keyboard's "send" key, in the company's internal chat window. ⁶ A perfectly random string of letters — something like "jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj" — was sent into the welcome channel, in front of everyone, mid-sentence.

⁷ There was a long, terrible pause. ⁸ Then someone unmuted themselves and said, completely deadpan, "Welcome to the team. We see your cat has strong opinions." ⁹ Everybody, including my boss, started laughing — and my boss eventually composed himself enough to say it was the most memorable first introduction he'd had in fifteen years of management.

¹⁰ What makes it funny in retrospect, I think, is the precision of the timing. ¹¹ A cat couldn't have planned that moment more perfectly if he'd actually understood corporate humour — which, judging by Mochi's general behaviour, he probably does.

A funny story that's become a permanent family joke happened on a road trip my parents and I took to Hualien when I was about sixteen. The car broke down in the middle of nowhere, my dad insisted he could fix it himself, and within twenty minutes had managed to make the situation significantly worse.

A funny story I love telling involves a friend of mine on a year abroad in France. He'd been trying to compliment his host mother's cooking and managed to say, in confidently broken French, that her pasta tasted exactly like the kind his mother used to make in prison.

The funniest story in my family — at my expense — is from when I was four years old and convinced I was going to be a magician. I performed an elaborate "disappearing act" at my own birthday party that involved hiding inside the kitchen rubbish bin.