A Chinese podcast · Same story, 4 levels
飓风吹倒了夏威夷的牛油果树，一个小岛用掉在地上的果子办了场比赛，救下了自己的电台
A Hurricane Flattened Hawaii's Avocado Trees — So One Island Held a Guacamole Contest and Saved Its Own Radio Station
About this story
Hurricane Lowell knocked thousands of avocado trees down on Kauaʻi in September 2026, at the exact start of avocado season, and the island filled up with free fruit nobody could eat. In the same week its community radio station — the only thing still broadcasting through the outage — warned it was nearly out of diesel. On 17 September, twenty-five batches of guacamole and nearly two hundred people raised over $5,000, double the target, and kept it on the air. Chinese listening practice at four levels. HSK 1 Chinese listening practice.
This is an HSK 1 Chinese listening episode that runs about 2 minutes. The full Mandarin script is shown with tap-for-pinyin and a line-by-line English translation, so you can listen and read at once — comprehensible input in the sense of Stephen Krashen's i+1 theory. It teaches 12 key vocabulary words such as 水果、吃、钱 and walks through 3 grammar patterns, each explained in English with examples. The same news story is retold at 4 difficulty levels — use the level selector above to find the version that is challenging but still understandable for you.
Read at your level
原文Read the complete story in Chinese. Reveal pinyin and English only when you need them.
English transcript reference
Hawaii has many small islands.
On one small island there are many trees.
On these trees grows a kind of fruit.
This fruit is called the avocado.
This September a very big hurricane came.
The hurricane was big — very big.
The hurricane came, and many trees fell down.
The trees fell, so the avocados were all on the ground.
Very, very many avocados, all on the ground.
The people on the island saw them.
They thought: what do we do with all these avocados?
Not eating them would be far too bad.
So they picked the avocados up.
They picked up a great many.
They took the avocados and put them out on the road.
They also put them in front of the shops.
These avocados cost no money.
You can take them. Everyone can take them.
These are free avocados.
The island also has a radio station.
You have a television, you have a telephone, and you also have a radio station.
At home you can listen to the radio station.
After the hurricane came, the radio station had no money.
The radio station could not speak any more.
Everyone on the island was unhappy.
Then the people on the island started to cook.
They used the avocados to cook.
This dish is called guacamole.
On the seventeenth of September, a lot of people came.
Twenty-five people made guacamole.
Everyone ate, and everyone watched.
Whose guacamole is the best?
Two hundred people came.
They ate the guacamole, and they gave money too.
This money was for the radio station.
They wanted two thousand five hundred dollars.
But they ended up with more than five thousand.
The radio station could speak again.
The hurricane came, and the trees fell.
The avocados that were on the trees were all on the ground.
But the people on the island did very well.
Now your home has a lot of fruit.
Far too much.
What will you do?
Listen again
Try it without the transcript and notice what sounds clearer.
What vocabulary does this episode teach?
词汇HSK 1. 这些树上有一种水果 — the category is given before the name, so the new word lands on something known.
HSK 1. 不吃，太不好了 — the line that starts everything the islanders do next.
HSK 1. Used in both directions: the avocados cost none, and the radio station had none.
HSK 1. 他们用牛油果做菜 — how guacamole gets introduced without any cooking vocabulary.
HSK 1. 你有电视，有电话，也有电台 — 电视 and 电话 are already yours, so 电台 arrives for free.
HSK 1. 岛上的人看见了 — the whole story starts with people walking outside and looking.
The subject. Named on line four and repeated more than any other word in the episode.
Built out of a word you just learned plus 酱 — 这个菜叫牛油果酱。
树倒了，牛油果都在地上 — the single sentence the whole episode hangs on.
夏威夷有很多小岛 — the geography stated in one line, with no other new words.
Note this is 飓风, not 台风 — Chinese uses 飓风 for Pacific and Atlantic hurricanes, 台风 only for the northwest Pacific.
Taught by placing it next to 电视 and 电话, two words a beginner already owns.
* beyond level超纲词
What grammar patterns appear in this episode?
语法A 了，B 就……
Once A happened, B followed. Two short clauses with no connective is how spoken Chinese shows cause and effect at this level.
树倒了，牛油果都在地上。
飓风来了，很多树都倒了。
这些……怎么办？
What do we do about all this? Puts a concrete pile of something in front of the listener and asks for a decision, which is how the episode turns.
他们想：这些牛油果怎么办？
谁的……最好？
Whose X is the best? 谁的 plus 最 is the plainest way Chinese frames a contest, and it needs no word for "competition".
谁的牛油果酱最好？
Proper nouns
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