When I was in the sixth grade, I became a big K-pop (Korean pop) fan. Almost half the students at my middle school were Korean and almost all of them listened to Korean music, especially K-pop. I had never been interested in it. It sounded too strange to me, but all changed in the sixth grade when the huge hit Gee came out. All my friends were singing the chorus and imitating the dance. Gee fever sucked me into K-pop. It became my life. I listened to K-pop non-stop and filled my iPod with it. In a month, I had memorized the names of countless members of boy and girl bands and stuck pictures of my singer “boyfriends” on my walls. I would ditch my weekend art and math classes and go to concerts with my friends. This would always result in my mom shouting that I was wasting my life. My mom thought K-pop was trash and wanted me to like classical music as she did. But classical music made me sleepy.

Every day during middle school I went to a K-pop gossip and news site called allkpop.com. On this site I learned that I could audition (试音) to become a singer in a K-pop band. The shining clothes, thousands of screaming fans and hearing them chant my name seemed much more exciting than being a middle school student. Becoming a K-pop star was all I wanted.

I started watching the audition videos of current stars and reading blog posts from people who had auditioned. They explained much about the audition. This made me want to audition even more. After watching those videos, I saw that most of the current stars weren’t that amazing in their auditions and that each singer had improved so much through training. I had never had vocal lessons (声乐课) and didn’t think of myself as a good singer. “But if they could do it, I could do that too,” I thought.

When people are driving, they like listening to music on the radio in the car. Music makes the ride interesting. 【小题1】

There is a kind of wonderful road in Japan—melody road. 【小题2】 When you drive on it, you can hear nice songs. There are three melody roads in Japan. 【小题3】 When you drive on it, you can hear the song Memories of Summer. Lots of drivers like this road very much. 【小题4】 Many people drive their cars to the road only because they want to listen to the nice song.

【小题5】 The designer (设计者) of this road says, “You can hear the beautiful song best when your speed(速度) is 50 kilometers an hour”.