This kid was asked to imagine the perfect desk-chair of the future – what it would look like, and what it would do – and boy, does he ever. The chair turns into all kinds of utopian machinery. It flies, it helps you sleep, and it carries your books to school. Sentence structure is pretty easy and the language is solidly intermediate, with very little advanced vocab (one idiom, a couple of advanced words but not much). At six paragraphs, the text is a bit long, though.
In this text, you’ll notice several uses of the character “型”. 型 xíng means “type”, “kind”, “sort”. The character can be combined with other descriptive words, and in this text you’ll see 新型 – “New Type of…” and 大型, meaning “big type” or “large-scale”.
Here’s the original.
未来的桌椅
你想知道未来的桌椅是什么样子吗? 还是让我这个发明人来介绍一下吧!
未来的桌椅是高科技材料制成的,大小、颜色、形状能随意变化。早晨去上学,就按第一个按钮,颜色可以变成绿色,象征新的一天朝气蓬勃,这个桌椅变成了新型自行车,那时候人们讲究环保,每个学生都骑这样的车去上学,不用别的能源,有太阳能和风就够了。如果遇见堵车的现象,自行车就会飞跃过去,保证准时到达学校。
到了学校,请按第二个按钮,绿色自行车变成了蓝色电脑桌椅,开始上课学习,根本不用带书包呀、文具盒、教材什么的。一切学习任务都在电脑上完成。
到了放学的时候,又变回自行车回到家。当然这时候的车速可以放慢,好好欣赏一下大自然的风光。回到家没有作业,这时请按第三个橘色按钮,自行车再变成大型游戏机,你就可以玩各种游戏了。当然,对眼睛没有害处。
到了晚上,请按第四个按钮,游戏机变成了你喜欢颜色的折叠床,发出美妙的音乐,催你甜蜜地入眠。假如你感觉哪儿不舒服了,就从床头伸出几个按摩头给你按摩,让你安然入睡。
怎么样,我发明的未来的桌椅你一定喜欢吧?欢迎你现在就来预订一套。
15 replies on “Essay: Desk-chairs of the Future”
Man I need one of those.
So would I. But it seems impossible to jump over traffic.
太可爱了,那个孩子非常聪明!
Patent the concept now, kid. Sort out the engineering details later.
WOW
A very good text to practice reading.
Thanks for the effort! Being able to read a Chinese text with ease for once is such a great feeling!!
Thank you for your post !!
So let me get this. There trying to make a high tec machine that could like practecly do anything, but the problem is it is gonna cost a bunch of mony at this point but further in theyr problebly be cheap but anyways that’ll be AWSOME but extremely hard to make
TOTALLY AGREE!!! Its epic, but too much
Very good I agree.
Sounds a little bit far fetched. But then again, if someone had tried to tell us 25 years ago that future telephones could give you directions, teach you languages and get you laid, we probably wouldn’t have believed that either.
In case you have a functional desk top, it is usually
the chair that will actually help keep up your good
posture even if you’re just unwinding outside of the house.
I Love all of the conspicuous specifics you pointed out
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Hi is there any more information about the actual author of this piece of text? Do you know if it has any copyright? I’d like to use it as a graphic for a project im working on
Hi Jon, unfortunately none of these pieces are good for use on projects off this site – the translations are done by me, the original authors are often un-contactable for a variety of reasons (this one because a school student wrote it, it’s an essay done for a school, which was found on a massive teacher’s repository for Chinese educators who share their student’s work). I use them here under Fair Use, as it’s for educational purposes and I’ve only quoted part of it, but probably not a good idea to re-duplicate elsewhere, since the copyright is super fuzzy. That said, if you need some text for a project, let me know what project, and I can perhaps point you to something with a clearer, uh, chain of custody.