现在如果不出意外的话，参加雅思考试的孩子（或者大龄青年）获取新闻的途径就是网络了吧，所以我也特别费解为什么命题人那么执着，总是要问我们newspaper的问题。那么网络这么好的资源，我们应该怎么好好利用一下呢！相信大家都很喜欢那种video-sharing website例如需要翻墙看的YouTube，或者国内各大视频网站，以及在微博上大家分享的视频，都可以成为雅思口语的绝好素材！下面的两段故事（或者大家也可以理解为news），都是取自视频素材，我们来瞧一瞧（当然为了答题需要，有些地方增添了虚构的情节，不过大家可以不用在意这些细节）。

狗血剧情：

There was a boy who met someone on the social networking website, and they just hit it off right away. From the profile picture, that person is a gorgeous lady with long black hair and fair skin. So it was like love at first sight for the boy. Over time, the boy got crazy about her, and he believed that she was the one. So he decided to ask her out, since they were in the same city.

But he was a little concerned, ‘cause people might lie about themselves on the Internet, specially the profile picture, which sometimes can be deceiving. So he was worried that she was not as pretty as he thought. However, his anxiety soon disappeared the moment he saw her/the moment he saw her, he totally blew off his anxiety. She was even more stunning in person. And during dinner, he was deeply attracted by her fascinating smile and gentle voice, and soon he fell in love with her. So they started to date.

And the romantic relationship went so well that they decided to settle down. But something unbelievable happened on their wedding night, which is the high point of the story, and you might not believe this but the picture-perfect girl is actually a boy. I was shocked by the twist of the story, and I don’t know what happened to them in the end, but everybody around me who heard about this story hopes that they could live happily ever after.

萌宠视频：

I’d like to talk about a piece of hilarious news I heard from TV the other day.

There’s a News Channel in our local TV station that would broadcast entertaining news stories that happened in town.

And one day they interviewed a man who’s the owner of a cat. The man said, recently there was something strange going on in his house, there’s weird noise that kept happening upstairs, but he could never catch what it was. He was so curious about it, so he set up a camera to see what it was. And he was shocked by what he saw. At the beginning of the video, he saw his cat lying on the bed, licking his fur. But 10 minutes later, the cat started to bark just like a dog. I saw the video as well, it was like Wow, wow, wow… which was so funny and cracked everyone up.

The owner was so confused, he was pretty sure that his cat was not a cat, but he didn’t know what it was. So he went to this News Channel to share his amusing story with the audience.

And it became a hit overnight. People who saw this news story were all intrigued, and some audience even sent the videos of interesting behavior of their pets. So a week later, the channel did a follow-up report, broadcasting all those funny videos to the viewers.

So I guess that’s the local news that people were interested in.