Long Listening · Section 5

Childhood

I like this topic because it's fun to look back and remember things from your childhood. I was born in 1993,

Level: A2 · 67 sentences

Transcript

  1. I like this topic because it's fun to look back
  2. and remember things from your childhood. I was born in 1993,
  3. so I grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s.
  4. If you were born in a different decade,
  5. then you probably had a different type of childhood than I did.
  6. Our childhood depends a lot on the time period that we grew up in.
  7. It also depends a lot on the place in which we grew up.
  8. Let's talk about that first.
  9. I grew up in the suburbs of Southern California,
  10. which you've probably seen featured in some American movies.
  11. The suburbs are areas around a city
  12. where there are more houses and fewer businesses.
  13. They're residential areas. Growing up in the suburbs,
  14. kids spend a lot of time playing outside with their neighbors.
  15. During my childhood, I played outside with my neighbors for hours on end.
  16. It's common to play in the streets,
  17. on front lawns, or in parks or nature places.
  18. Starting from a young age, my neighbors and I would invent games
  19. and use our imagination to have fun.
  20. I also remember playing a lot of sports,
  21. building tree houses, and even collecting bugs.
  22. When I was a young child,
  23. the world was such a big and exciting place for me.
  24. Everything was an adventure.
  25. However, around the same time I was growing up,
  26. video games and the internet started becoming really popular.
  27. So, as each year went by, I started spending more time indoors,
  28. playing Xbox, surfing the web, etc.
  29. I slowly forgot about all my outside adventures.
  30. Nowadays, children have much more technology than I had when I was young.
  31. They can access all the fun and entertainment they want in seconds.
  32. And most children today probably can't imagine what childhood was like before all this technology.
  33. They might imagine it to be lame and boring.
  34. But honestly, I think I had more fun before I started using the internet regularly.
  35. I'm really glad that I was able to experience
  36. that classic American childhood for some years before the internet took over.
  37. How about you?
  38. Did you use the internet when you were a kid?
  39. Another important part of childhood is family.
  40. Growing up, my household included my mom,
  41. my dad, my older sister, and me.
  42. My family situation was pretty standard.
  43. My dad worked a full-time job.
  44. and my mom worked part-time, so she had more time
  45. to spend with me and my sister.
  46. Of course, I had a lot of fights with my sister,
  47. as most siblings do, but we always loved each other.
  48. Did you fight with your siblings when you were a kid?
  49. So, one tradition that my family had was that we would eat
  50. dinner at 6.30 6.30 p.m. p.m. every day.
  51. I remember that sometimes my mother would ring a little bell
  52. to tell us that dinner was ready.
  53. This was the dinner bell. It was great being able to eat
  54. that meal together with my family every evening.
  55. It gave us the opportunity to spend time together
  56. and talk about our day.
  57. We never watched TV when we were eating dinner.
  58. Nowadays, it's less common for American families to eat dinner together.
  59. Okay, one last thing about childhood
  60. that I wanted to talk about is cartoons.
  61. I loved watching cartoons when I was young.
  62. Every Saturday morning, I would wake up at around 6.50 6.50
  63. because all the new episodes of my favorite cartoons
  64. would start at 7 a.m. a.m.
  65. And on weekdays, there would be new episodes at night too.
  66. Some of my favorite cartoons were Hey Arnold, Rocket Power, and Yu-Gi-Oh!
  67. I really miss those shows.