Model answer
Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
I'd like to talk about the bus ride from my hometown, Thu Dau Mot, back to my university in Saigon, which I take every Sunday evening and dread from about Sunday lunchtime onwards. On the map it's nothing, barely thirty kilometres, and on a quiet day a motorbike could do it in under an hour. But I don't have a motorbike, so I take the public bus, and on a Sunday that same distance takes anything from ninety minutes to two and a half hours. There are several reasons I dislike it. The first is the crowd. Half the students in the province seem to be going back at the same time, so I usually stand the whole way with a stranger's box of mangoes pressed against my knees. The second is the road itself, a highway lined with factories and container trucks, with nothing to look at except dust. And then there's the driver's taste in entertainment: the same comedy show on a small screen at the front, at full volume, every single week. I think I could recite it by now. What really gets to me, though, is the mood. I've just had two days of my mother's cooking and my own bed, and with every kilometre the weekend drains away and Monday's eight o'clock lecture gets closer. Last month the conductor noticed my face and said, 'Cheer up, you'll be back on Friday,' which was kind, but didn't help much. I could stay in the dormitory at weekends and avoid the whole thing, of course. But my mother's braised fish is worth two hours of standing, so I'll keep complaining and keep buying the ticket.