P94 2b
April Fool’s Day is a celebration that takes place in different countries around the world. It happens on April 1st every year and is a day when many people play all kinds of tricks and jokes on each other.
One April Fool’s Day, a reporter in England announced that there would be no more spaghetti because the spaghetti farmers in Italy had stopped growing spaghetti. Many people ran to their local supermarkets to buy as much spaghetti as they could. By the time people realized that the story was a hoax, all of the spaghetti across the country had been sold out. Another famous trick in England was when a TV show reported the discovery of special water. They said this water would help people lose weight and that one customer had already lost a lot of weight in just four months. By the end of the day, more than 10,000 people had phoned the TV station to find out how to get this water.
Many April Fool’s jokes may end up being not very funny. A famous TV star once invited his girlfriend onto his show on April Fool’s Day. He asked her to marry him. The lady was so happy because she really wanted to get married. However, when she said “yes”, he replied, “April Fool!” That little joke didn’t have a very happy ending. The TV star lost both his girlfriend and his show.
One of the world’s most famous tricks, however, happened in October rather than April. In that month in 1938, actor Orson Welles announced on his radio program that aliens from Mars had landed on the earth. He described where they had landed and told how they were moving across the United States. Welles made it sound so real that hundreds of people believed the story, and fear spread across the whole country. By the time police officers
announced that the story was a hoax, thousands of people had left their homes.
Section B , 2b
愚人節是一個世界上許多不同國家都會慶祝的節日。它在每年的4月1日，這是一個許多人會互相開各種玩笑或惡作劇的日子。
有一年的愚人節，英國的一位記者宣稱，由於意大利農民停止種植意大利麵條，以後將不再有意大利麵了。許多人都跑到當地的超市儘可能多地買意大利麵。等人們意識到這是一個惡作劇的時候，全國所有的意大利麵條都被賣光了。在另一個著名的惡作劇中，英國一家電視節目報道發現了一種特殊的水。他們說這種水可以幫助人們減肥，有位消費者僅4個月就減掉了很多體重。（結果）在當天結束之前，超過1萬人打電話到電視臺，詢問如何得到這種水。
許多愚人節玩笑的結局並不那麼有趣。一位著名的電視明星曾在愚人節邀請他的女朋友上他的電視節目。他向她求婚，那位女士是如此的高興，因為她真的想結婚了。然而，當她說好的時候，他卻回答：“愚人節傻瓜”！這個小玩笑的結局並不愉快。電視明星失去了他的女朋友，而且他的節目也被取消了。
然而，世界上最出名的惡作劇之一卻發生在10月而不是4月。在1938年的10月，演員奧森.威爾斯在他的電臺節目中宣佈來自火星的外星人已登陸地球。他描述了他們在哪裡登陸，還告訴大家這些外星人正在如何穿越美國。威爾斯讓他的話聽起來如此逼真，以至於數以百計的人相信了這個故事，恐懼在整個國家蔓延。等到警察宣佈這個故事是惡作劇時，已經有數以千計的人離開了他們的家園
。
