The City That Puts Gold On Ice Cream
Kanazawa in Japan makes almost all of the country's gold leaf, and wraps whole sheets of it around soft ice cream.
Before you read
Before you read
3 questions at the end. Read or listen first, then see how much you understood.
Quiz ↓This ice cream is real gold. Send this to your friend with a sweet tooth. In Japan there is an old city called Kanazawa. You buy a normal soft ice cream there, and then somebody wraps a whole sheet of gold around it.
The gold is beaten until it is very flat. It is thinner than a hair. It moves in the smallest breath of wind, so the workers must be slow and quiet and cannot breathe near it. Almost all of the gold leaf in Japan is made in this one city, and people have made it here for more than four hundred years.
You can eat it. Gold is safe, and it has almost no taste at all. So the ice cream tastes like ice cream. It only looks like treasure. People hold it up, the light hits it, and the whole street turns to look. Then they eat it too slowly, or the wind finds it, and the gold slides off into the road, and everybody laughs.
That's the story. Now, did you get it? ↓
You just heard Polly
Want to hear what YOU sound like?
Read a line of the story out loud. Your recording stays on your device and is never uploaded.
Not bad, right? In the PollyStop app, Polly listens to exactly that and scores you right away.
Coaching, saved words, spaced repetition, and a fresh story every day.
Get PollyStop freeDid you understand the text?
Did you get it?
The questions are in English.
What city in Japan is known for putting gold on ice cream?
How long have people been making gold leaf in Kanazawa?
What happens to the gold when the wind blows?
Your AI tutor
Now say it out loud. Talk about this story with Polly.
Polly is PollyStop's voice tutor. She talks with you about stories like this one, out loud.
Get PollyStop free.
- A new graded story every day, with audio.
- Save the words you meet and practise them later.
- Speaking practice with feedback.
- Polly, the voice tutor, is opening up to more learners.
Keep going at A2
Next stories
Read this story in another language.
Same story, different language. Compare the shape and rhythm without losing the plot.
3 questions at the end
Read, then check what you understood