Cue Card – Chủ đề Waiting time for someone or sometime

Describe an occasion when you had to wait a long time for someone or something to arrive.

You should say:

• who or what you were waiting for
• how long you had to wait
• why you had to wait a long time

and explain how you felt about waiting a long time.

Sample
 

Call it bad or undesirable, but I have a terrible distaste for waiting a long time for anything unless I have a very – I mean “very”- valid reason to do so. But, no matter how “ill-equipped” we really are to deal with this kind of “unpleasant” situation, the reality is we do deal with it from time to time. Today, I am going to talk about such a situation, involving my final semester result for one of my courses at my university, when I had to wait for almost an extra day.

It was about 10 years ago, and I had finished taking all of my tests. After that, the only thing I could do was to wait for the final results which were scheduled to be published exactly after one week, from the date of my final test, online on our university network system. So, it wasn’t exactly supposed to be a matter of great concern for me unless, of course, I was “failing” the subject. But, that wasn’t a possibility either as I was pretty confident about my performance on all of the tests. In fact, I was aiming to finish my university studies with a top-class result.

Anyway, the “big day” finally arrived, and I headed to my university campus with anticipation of top-class performance as far as my final semester results were concerned. And, after reaching the university, I immediately logged on to one of the computers at our computer lab in order to view my final grades, only to find out, of course, that the results had not been published yet, and the message on the computer system was “the final grades will be published soon. Please wait”.

So, there I started to wait, sitting on a chair while looking at my computer screen. Initially, I told myself that it wasn’t a big deal since the results were going to be published soon even though I was a bit surprised, I must say. But, after waiting for a couple of hours, when my computer gave me the same kind of message as the last one, I started to become frustrated. Then, after waiting for another couple of hours while staring at my computer screen in an anticipation of some positive news, I wasn’t frustrated anymore. Instead, I actually became really annoyed since I wasn’t getting any definitive news about my final grades.

However, finally, when I got the message that said – “the final grades will be published tomorrow due to some system errors” on my computer screen, I became really, really confused and mad (with a capital “M”) at the same time. Then, I also started to worry about the possibility of getting “wrong grades”, and I must say that I wasn’t really feeling very well after thinking of that “scary possibility” for rest of the day. In fact, the remaining hours of that day suddenly felt like a “year” to me, and the same feeling carried on until the moment I finally got to see my results the following day.

Phân tích từ vựng

Undesirable (adj): phiền phức/không ai ưa

Distaste (n): sự không ưa thích

No matter how: dù cho thế nào

Deal with: giải quyết

From time to time (adv): Thỉnh thoảng

Anticipation (n): sự tiên đoán

Initially (adv): ban đầu

Frustrated (adj): nản chí

Carried on: tiếp tục