A student sitting at a desk at night, studying for an exam

The Night Before the Exam

Напередодні іспиту

965 words6:22Intermediate

A story about a student preparing for an important exam, balancing anxiety, focus, and rest.

Audio version

Основний текст

Читай текст у контексті й натискай підсвічені слова, щоб відкрити переклад, транскрипцію та дії зі словником.

Anna stared at the open textbook on her desk, but the words were starting to one long line of black ink. She checked the time on her phone: 21:47. Her in economics was at nine o’clock the next morning, and she still felt that there were whole chapters she did not really understand. She sighed, took a deep breath, and told herself that she just needed to keep going for another hour.

Her room looked as tired as she felt. There were two empty coffee cups on the windowsill, a half-eaten apple on a plate, and on the wall with short formulas and important definitions. Earlier that week, she had promised herself that she would start studying early and review a little every day. Of course, real life had not been so simple. A surprise shift at work, a family dinner, and a friend’s birthday had all taken pieces of her time. Now, on the night before the exam, all those small decisions were quietly asking for attention.

She opened her notebook and tried to focus on one problem at a time. At first it went well. She solved an example from last year’s exam, then another one from the practice sheet her teacher had sent. But slowly her mind began to wander. What if the questions were harder this year? What if there was something important she had completely forgotten about? What if her brain simply refused to work in the morning?

Her phone lit up again with a new message in the class . Someone wrote, "Does anyone understand question 3 from the sample test? I’m completely lost." Another person replied with a long explanation and a picture of their notes. The chat was moving quickly, full of panicked jokes and last-minute questions. Anna watched the conversation for a moment and felt her rise with every new notification. Part of her wanted to read everything, just in case there was a detail she had missed. Another part of her knew that the constant noise was .

She put the phone face down on the desk and flipped it to silent mode. For a few minutes, the room became quiet again, and she managed to concentrate on a difficult graph. She slowly drew the axes, the curve, and the point where two lines met, saying the explanation as if she were the teacher. Hearing her own voice made the idea feel more solid, less like a cloud of numbers and more like a simple story.

After a while, her eyes began to burn, and the letters on the page seemed heavier than before. She closed the textbook and leaned back in her chair. It was just after ten. She still felt that she had not done enough, but another thought appeared in her mind, small and stubborn: maybe rest was also part of the preparation.

She remembered something her older brother had told her before his own finals. He had said, "The night before the exam is not about learning everything. It’s about giving your brain the chance to use what it already knows." At the time, she had laughed and accused him of being lazy. Now, sitting in her quiet room, the sentence sounded wiser than she had expected.

Anna stood up and opened the window a little. Cool evening air entered the room, bringing with it the distant sounds of cars and someone walking a dog on the street below. She stretched her arms, feeling the tension in her shoulders and neck. Instead of making another cup of coffee, she walked to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. The cold drink woke her up in a different way, not with nervous energy, but with a calmer, clearer feeling.

She decided to make a . She would review just two more topics, the ones that felt the most important, and then she would go to bed, no matter what the group chat was discussing. Back at her desk, she wrote the names of those topics on a clean page and set a timer for thirty minutes. The ticking seconds reminded her that this was a limited task, not an endless ocean.

When the timer rang, she was surprised to see how much she had written on the page. There were arrows connecting ideas, short examples in the margins, and a few question marks that showed where she still felt unsure. But compared to the fear she had felt an hour earlier, the uncertainty was smaller, more .

Before turning off the light, she finally checked her phone. The class group chat was still active, but now the messages were shorter. People were starting to say good night and wish each other luck. One of her classmates had written, "Remember to sleep, future economists. " Anna smiled at the screen and typed, "Good night, everyone. See you at nine." Then she put her phone on the other side of the room.

In bed, with the window still slightly open, she listened to the quiet night sounds and let her thoughts slow down. She knew that the exam would not be perfect. There might be questions she could not fully answer, and moments when she would need to guess. But she also knew that she had done what she could tonight, and that tomorrow her task would be to breathe, read carefully, and trust the work she had already done.

As she finally closed her eyes, the sticky notes on the wall waited silently in the dark, their formulas and definitions resting for a few hours, just like their owner.

The Night Before the Exam

Основний текст

Вправи

Обговорення