It’s eight o’clock on Christmas morning, and my dad says he wants to listen to the news. My 11-year-old self is wondering why on Earth grown-ups would be interested in the news when there are important things to be done, such as handing out presents. And then, while I am only half-listening, something strange happens: the newsreader begins talking about a Christmas message. Hadn’t we heard that report earlier?
My older brother, Colin, figures out what’s happening. “Pete, Pete, it’s a tape recorder! We’ve got our tape recorder!”
It finally dawns on me: my dad recorded the news and is playing it back now.
Colin and I had both been blind from birth. At the special school that Colin and I attended, a recorder of your own was the height of desire. However, realistic about family finances, we had no real expectations of getting one.
The tape recorder my dad bought us would have cost more than four times his weekly wage. He could only afford it by borrowing the money. I know my mum and dad would have thought long and hard before being in the debt.
The new toy controlled the rest of the Christmas holidays. Once we had mastered the controls, we recorded anything and everything: each other, our parents, the milkman, the dog... and we very quickly learned how much fun we could have with it.
It wasn’t the first time I had been attracted by a tape recorder. I vividly remember walking into a room when I was four and hearing a child’s tuneless singing. I stopped dead. “It’s you,” Dad said.
It turned out that he had borrowed a tape recorder. So for the first time, in the same way that a sighted child might react to seeing themselves in a mirror, I got the sense of myself as a separate person who existed outside my head and was experienced by other people.
注意：1.词数150左右；
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
I took my first steps down the path to my career as a broadcaster when I returned to school.
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Ten years later, I walked into a radio station, in the hopes of selling myself as a broadcast journalist.
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