Speaking Part 2 收過的禮物 Band 7+ 範答

Describe a gift you received that was important to you.

You should say:

• what the gift was
• who gave it to you
• when you received it
• and explain why it was important.

¹ The most meaningful gift I've ever been given is an old Nikon FM2 film camera that belonged to my grandfather. ² He gave it to me on my eighteenth birthday, which was only about four months before he passed away from lung cancer, though at the time none of us knew how little time he had left.

³ I still remember him pulling it out of a battered leather case, explaining how the light meter worked in Mandarin too quickly for me to follow, and handing me a roll of black-and-white film he'd kept in the fridge for years. ⁴ Honestly, at eighteen, I would have preferred a smartphone. ⁵ I took the camera home, put it on a shelf, and didn't touch it for almost a year.

⁶ It was only after my grandfather's funeral that I dug it out again and shot my first roll. ⁷ Getting the film developed was a strange experience — there was a photo of him at a family dinner in the middle of the roll that he must have taken himself, which I hadn't realised was there. ⁸ That single frame turned the camera from an awkward present into something I couldn't bear to put back on the shelf.

⁹ Seven years on, I still use it regularly — I've probably shot fifty rolls through it now, and I develop most of them myself in a small bathroom darkroom at home. ¹⁰ The gift wasn't really the camera; it was the fact that he chose me, specifically, out of his grandchildren, and trusted that I'd eventually understand why. ¹¹ Photography has become one of the most important things in my life, and every photograph I take has his fingerprints on it in some sense.

A gift that's stayed with me is a second-hand copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude that my high-school Chinese teacher gave me on the last day of term. It had her own handwriting in the margins, and it was technically against school policy for her to give gifts to students.

Probably the most meaningful gift I've received is a hand-knitted blanket my best friend made for me during her last year of university. It's not perfect — you can see where she dropped stitches — but that's exactly why I love it.

The best gift I've ever been given wasn't an object — it was a trip. My parents paid for me to spend two weeks in Kyoto after I finished my master's thesis. I'd been under enormous stress for about eighteen months, and the permission to just disappear was exactly what I needed.