[originaltext] Moderator: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Our speake

Moderator:
    Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Our speaker for today is Megan Washington. She has won two ARIA Awards, the Australian equivalent of the Grammys. As a popular singer and songwriter, she has recently come clean with a secret—that she has a stutter, a speech problem that makes her speak with sudden pauses and a tendency to repeat rapidly the same sound or syllable. She’s going to share with us her fear of public speaking.
    Ms. Washington:
    Thank you.
    I didn’t know when I agreed to do this whether I was expected to talk or to sing. But when I was told that the topic was language, I felt that I had to speak about something for a moment.
    I have a problem. And the thing is that I have a stutter. It might seem curious given that I spend a lot of my life on the stage. One would assume that I’m comfortable in the public sphere and comfortable here. But the truth is that I’ve spent my life up until this point and including this point, living in mortal dread of public speaking. Public singing is a whole different thing. But we’ll get to that in a moment. I’ve never really talked about it before so explicitly. I think that that’s because I’ve always lived in hope that when I was a grown-up, I wouldn’t have one. So I can talk about it now because I’ve reached this point, where—I mean, I’m 28. I’m pretty sure that I’m grown-up now. And I’m an adult woman who spends her life as a performer, with a speech impediment. So, I might as well come clean about it.
    There are some interesting angles to having a stutter. For me, the worst thing that can happen is meeting another stutterer. This happened to me in Hamburg, when this guy said to me, "Hello, m-m-m-my name is Joe, " and I said, "Oh, hello, m-m-m-my name is Meg. " Imagine my horror when I realized he thought I was making fun of him.
    I’ve had a lot of therapy, and a common form of treatment is to use this technique that’s called smooth speech, which is where you almost sing everything that you say. I got through it that way for my job. But as an artist who feels that their work is based solely on a platform of honesty and being real, that feels often like cheating.
    This is why before I sing, I wanted to tell you what singing means to me. It’s more than making nice sounds, and it’s more than making nice songs. It’s more than feeling known or understood. It’s more than making you feel the things that I feel. Somehow, through some miraculous function of the human brain, it’s impossible to stutter when you sing. And when I was younger, that was a method of treatment that worked very well for me, so I did it a lot. And that’s why I’m here today.
    Thank you very much. Thank you.
    Questions 16 to 19 are based on the recording you have just heard.
    16. What does the introduction part say about Megan Washington?
    17. What hope did Megan Washington once have?
    18. What did Megan Washington think of her experience in Hamburg?
    19. What does singing mean to Megan Washington?