雅思口语9分素材大搜集——童年之misconception

小的时候，是否有过月亮深情跟我走天涯的误解？是否以为猫猫都是母的，狗狗都是公的？亦或是鱼缸中的金鱼会陪着我们一起长大？ Bingo!你中招了。童年的我们，有过太多的天真的以为。而后的岁月，会无情将其一一粉碎。

1.I thought babies came from a catalog order.

我以为婴儿来自目录邮购。
We lived in a very small town, where my mom ordered a lot of our clothes from a catalog. She'd make the call, place the order, and a few weeks later we'd receive whatever she'd ordered.

So one day when I was 4 yrs old, my parents told me that we were getting a baby girl, and i would have a little sister!! They'd placed the call (to what I later understood was an adoption agency), ordered a baby girl, and in a few months, we'd have her!

So of course, I naturally concluded that you order babies from a catalog.

2.I used to believe that some people were inherently special.
我原以为有些人与生俱来就是特别的。
the president, Nelson Mandela, The Beatles. I thought that when they were born they knew they were going to become great. I think this was largely because of the narratives in books and movies where you follow a character from a young age and you know from the very beginning that they're going to be important. My view was especially warped by stories where the character starts lazy and then has powers or influential friendships handed to them.

3. That HIV / AIDS, and most diseases generally, could be cured by boiling the blood.
艾滋病，还有其他大多数疾病，都可以通过煮沸血液而治愈。

When I was 7, I thought I was really smart, and scientists were getting the cure to HIV all wrong.

I felt that pathogens in the blood were just basically impurities, and just like water, blood can be purified by boiling. So, I drew machines that would get the blood out of the body, boil it and put the "purified" blood back in, and in my head, I had found the cure to most diseases and I was going to win a Nobel prize.( Well, technically that will kill HIV and anything else living in the bloodstream. Unfortunately)

4.I thought that when it rained, it rained everywhere.
我天真地以为下雨的时候，每一个地方都在下雨。

I remember riding in the car with my mom when I was around 8. It had been raining and we were on a short trip across town, when very suddenly it stopped. So suddenly I said "Wow! It stopped raining so fast!" My mom, probably slightly confused, said "We just drove out from a cloud."

I knew that rain came from clouds, but I hadn't realized that there could be clouds in some places and not others. I was very confused and asked her what that meant. I even tried to argue with her that there were always clouds above us, maybe just higher up. So she explained that not all clouds are raining if one is.

Things started to click at this point: we had learned in school about why clouds started to rain, and it started to seem believable that one could be ready but another not. I was suspicious, but realized it made sense.

The next day in school I asked my science teacher who looked stunned that I didn't know this.

5.I believed that if I wrote a message on a rolled up piece of paper, tied it to the string of a gas balloon and left the balloon loose in the air - it would fly higher and higher and reach heaven sometime soon, and my message would reach God.
上帝会收到我放在气球上的信息。

I can not even imagine just how many messages I must have sent to the Almighty that way - some were just wishes to keep me and my family happy, and others were notes asking him for the beautiful doll I saw on the shelf of a shop the other day.

6.I thought there were two pacific oceans in the world.

我以为世界上有两个太平洋。

Looking at the world map in my geography class I had this doubt for a long time as to why they had named two oceans with the same name.

Finally I couldn't take it and got up in class to point out to my teacher how stupid the naming scheme was.

His first reaction? A facepalm.

He then went on to take the flat map, and roll it into a cylinder and voila, the world had one less ocean!

I had one less misconception :D

7.I used to think some animals were good and other animals were bad.
我曾以为有些动物是善良的，有些动物是邪恶的。
The cartoons I had watched consistently portrayed certain animals as bad (almost all reptiles and scavengers, and some carnivores) and others are the good guys (the herbivores and the "cute" or "majestic" carnivores).

When for the first time I watched nature documentaries I was extremely confused, the bad guys were sometimes victimized by the good guys, and the good guys treated one another so poorly. I couldn't figure out who the good guys were anymore, when I asked my mom, she told me something along the lines of "there are no good guys and no bad guys, there are only good deeds and bad deeds".

I guess she took the opportunity to try to teach me something about human morality, instead of simply telling me that human morality doesn't apply to animals.

8. When I was a kid I used to think that when characters died in movies, they were dead for real.
我曾认为电影当中的人物的死是真死。
I remember watching a movie where the protagonist dies and was cremated.

Me: Mom! Did that hero die?

Mom: Yeah, he did. That's why he was cremated.

Me: But why did he have to die?

Mom: He is paid money by the movie people. He has to do what they ask him to do

This totally spooked me out because I thought that he was paid a huge amount of money to actually die! I then decided to never become an actor in the movies :)

9. That a money plant actually gave money.
金钱树真的会结钱。

I guess it was during my 2nd or 3rd grade when a friend of mine came up and told me that he was going to be rich soon. On inquiring further he told me that he had found a good place in the school playground where he had dug up a hole and planted a "money plant" with ~ 220 (don't remember the exact amount) yuan (quite a big sum, especially, back then). The nice guy even went on to offer me a share if I helped him water it everyday. Though not entirely convinced, I believed him, and went home to tell mom and brother how good a guy he was and even suggested we do something similar at home. Obviously, they had a good laugh and the next day when my friend's mom, after knowing what her son had did, came to look for that planted money, it was already too late. The money was gone and my friend had one hell of a time at home.