[00:01.080]--- lesson 33 A day to remember
[00:05.840]--- Listen to the tape then answer the question below.
[00:11.320]--- What incident began the series of traffic accidents?
[00:17.160]We have all experienced days when everything goes wrong.
[00:21.360]A day may begin well enough, but suddenly everything seems to get out of control.
[00:27.440]What invariably happens is that a great number of things choose to go wrong at precisely the same moment.
[00:35.040]It is as if a single unimportant event set up a chain of reactions.
[00:41.120]Let us suppose that you are preparing a meal and keeping an eye on the baby at the same time.
[00:48.080]The telephone rings and this marks the prelude to an unforeseen series of catastrophes.
[00:55.280]While you are on the phone, the baby pulls the tablecloth off the table,
[01:00.560]smashing half your best crockery and cutting himself in the process.
[01:05.920]You hang up hurriedly and attend to baby, crockery, etc.
[01:10.760]Meanwhile, the meal gets burnt.
[01:13.360]As if this were not enough to reduce you to tears, your husband arrives, unexpectedly bringing three guests to dinner.
[01:22.560]Things can go wrong on a big scale, as a number of people recently discovered in Parramatta, a suburb of Sydney.
[01:31.440]During the rush hour one evening two cars collided and both drivers began to argue.
[01:37.520]The woman immediately behind the two cars happened to be a learner.
[01:42.760]She suddenly got into a panic and stopped her car.
[01:46.680]This made the driver following her brake hard.
[01:50.600]His wife was sitting beside him holding a large cake.
[01:54.560]As she was thrown forward, the cake went right through the windscreen and landed on the road.
[02:01.120]Seeing a cake flying through the air, a lorry driver who was drawing up alongside the car, pulled up all of a sudden.
[02:09.720]The lorry was loaded with empty beer bottles and hundreds of them slid off the back of the vehicle and on to the road.
[02:18.000]This led to yet another angry argument.
[02:21.760]Meanwhile, the traffic piled up behind.
[02:25.240]It took the police nearly an hour to get the traffic on the move again.
[02:30.160]In the meantime, the lorry driver had to sweep up hundreds of broken bottles.
[02:36.200]Only two stray dogs benefited from all this confusion, for they greedily devoured what was left of the cake.
[02:44.680]It was just one of those days!