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英创教育「早鸟早读」计划第【3102】天明早8:30不见不散！??

Topic 4: Your Favourite Food at a Traditional FestivalQuestion: Describe your favourite food at a traditional festival or special event in your country.Answer: Well, I think my favourite food at a special event would have to be not just one item, but a whole dish, and that is Christmas dinner. So Christmas dinner in the UK is a really important thing. It"s a big part of our traditional Christmas celebrations. So we have it usually around 03:00 p.m. on Christmas Day, which is the 25 December. And it consists of, well, it consists of everything. It"s absolutely enormous. It"s massive.So the main elements would be some kind of roast meat. The most traditional is roast turkey, but you can also have ham or chicken, some people have salmon, and of course, there are vegetarian options as well. But then you have a lot of different sides, and the sides are the things that people love. So the most famous is roast potatoes. And those potatoes have been roasted for over an hour in the oven in different types of fats, and they are crispy and delicious and very, very nice.You also have roast parsnips, roast carrots, so two different types of root vegetable, and then you complement that with lots of other things as well. One of my favourites is stuffing, which is some ground meat mixed with breadcrumbs and lots of different spices. And then you have gravy, which is a meat sauce. So it"s meat and potatoes with a meat sauce, but it"s absolutely delicious. And it"s made basically with a lot of thyme. So the recipes are not too difficult. It"s just that you have to roast them in the oven for hours and hours. So it"s pretty easy to do.And I like it because, of course, it tastes very good, but also it"s a special treat. It"s a very heavy meal, it"s full of calories, so you wouldn"t want to have it every day. But it"s a very enjoyable thing that we look forward to having on Christmas Day.Question: Is it bad for people to look at their phones during a meal?Answer: I think that that depends. Obviously, if you are eating by yourself and there"s something important to do, then, yes, you can look at your phone. I think that"s absolutely fine. It"s normal. We want to be entertained. So, yeah, look at your phone in that situation.I think that if you are at a traditional festival, like a Christmas, like another big family celebration, and there are lots of people sitting around the table and everybody"s in a conversation, and you are sitting with your nose glued to your  phone and not talking to anyone, I think that is bad. I think that"s antisocial. I think it"s a kind of a waste of your life, and you"re not really living your life. You"re just waiting for something elsewhere in the world to entertain you, whereas you should be focused and living in the moment more. So I think in that situation, yes, it would be bad.Question: Why do people like to have a big meal at traditional festivals or big events?Answer: Well, I think eating together is one of the oldest, maybe the oldest shared human activities. Because if you think about human history over hundreds of thousands of years, we were hunter-gatherers. So we would go out, we would try to hunt a big animal, like a big deer or, who knows, a mammoth, and then we would hopefully be successful. And as a celebration, we would cook a lot of the meat and eat it together and sit around the fire and talk about the hunt. And so it"s always been a part of our shared history.So I think it"s no surprise that wherever you go in the world, it doesn"t matter you"re in England or you"re in China or you"re in Africa or you"re in Australia or South America. Wherever you go, if people have a big celebration, they almost always will include some kind of eating together. It"s very important.Question: Do people in your country grow plants at home?Answer: I think people in my country tend to grow plants once they"ve retired or at the very least once they have bought a house that they know that they will live in for many years to come. And people of my generation, so in your twenties and your thirties, we haven"t quite reached that stage yet. We"re not living in our forever homes. So if you"re growing plants, it"s a long-term investment. You don"t grow plants for one year, you want to grow them for ten years, 20 years, and so you get the return on the hard work of doing that planting.So the people that I know haven"t started to grow plants, but I definitely think that we will in the future because it"s quite a healthy way to live, it"s a good hobby, and it"s a nice way to be in touch with nature as well.编辑：Moon▼IDE英创教育