5月9日至5月15日，2017“外研社杯”全国英语演讲大赛决赛定题演讲赛题投票火热进行，反响热烈。

投票活动中，有不少同学都感叹：“今年的赛题脑洞都开得好大呀”；有些同学犯了选择困难症：“在第2和第5之间摇摆不定的我该怎么选呀？”；还有不少同学对题目“一见钟情”：“第18题太赞啦！”，“第9题太炫酷”……

最终根据投票数量和专家评审团打分，20道赛题中有5道赛题杀出重围，晋级2017决赛定题演讲赛题的候选榜单。快来看看有没有你中意的那道题~

The Road Not Taken

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” The Road Not Taken, a poem written by Robert Frost, has left its readers with many different interpretations regardless of the original message that he had intended to convey. The “road” here can be life, belief, dream, work or even a person. No matter what the road stands for, the most vital thing is when faced with choices, how do we choose? Someone once said, “Whichever way they go, they’re sure to miss something good on the other path.”

What is your understanding of “The Road Not Taken”?

China, a Global View

Every day, we use our eyes, or minds or hearts to see things.

"To look is an act of choice".

We see the same things but how we see them makes all the difference. Our views may be conditioned or influenced or even shaped by what we know or what we want to know; by what we believe or what we want to believe.

When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match; when in resentment, however, we may see some other parts of the person. Viewed from different standpoints, with different mindsets, at different times and for different purposes, things will never look the same. That is why in Dead Poets Society the teacher encouraged his students to climb onto the table to look at the classroom with a bird’s eye view.

Since we human beings came onto this planet we have long been exploring our Mother Earth, viewing and reviewing it for thousands of years, until in 1972 the very first picture of it taken from a spacecraft presented us a global view of it and we saw “the whole thing”.

Throughout history, we Chinese and the world have been exploring China, viewing and reviewing inwards and outwards of its past, its present and its future.

What is China? It is a nation, an old one and a new one. It is a place, a big one and a small one. It is in Asia. It is in the East of the world. It is here! It is there! It is everywhere!

A famous Chinese scholar once said, “We should not see China from the inside, but we should see it from the outside.”

The topic for the prepared speech is “China, A Global View”. Please make a speech on the topic and add your own subtitle.

Literature Inspiring Me

Literature inspires me to know What I Have Lived For from Bertrand Russell, for love, for knowledge and for unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. And it is the same with you and him/her regardless of race, religion or gender.

With Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings, George Eliot got shocked and inspired, growing into a great writer with such writings as Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch.

With his problem plays, George Bernard Shaw let people know the social problems and their causes. What he did is indispensable to the progress of the human society.

With Bob Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind in her notebook, Jiang Li, a volunteer of “Doctors Without Borders”, was delivering children under the heavy fire in Afghanistan in 2013; And also with Bob Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind read by her together with her colleagues while as a guest of the CCTV program “The Reader” on February 18, 2017, Jiang Li wishes the newly born babies all around the world a happy and healthy growth. Audience including you, him/her and me seem reborn and growing.

Literature inspires me to know how to grow. The Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco holds the idea that all literary writings are Buildungsroamn / initiation stories. Reading them, I grow, you grow, s/he grows, and all of us are growing, knowing how to love, how to search for knowledge and how to alleviate the suffering of mankind.

We are approaching to what William Shakespeare describes in Hamlet “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties… The beauty of the world; the paragon of animals; and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?” And we are near to the perfectibility of human beings.

Literature will always be an inspiration to us on our way to The Conquest of Happiness for "One World, One Dream"

Make a speech about the “inspiration of literature” that you have experienced and how it helped you to grow. Please give your speech a title.

Fairness and Future

When we are young, we regard the world as an equal one, without unfairness or inequality. But we gradually grow up with time goes by, and the more we know the more we find something hidden behind the back. Despite the fact that we are taught that everything is equal and fair, we still can see the gap between the rich and the poor, the discrimination against race and gender, and the prejudice against different social system cultures. We are puzzled and lost at times; the future seems bleak and hopeless without fairness.

The truth is, life is never fair, and never will be. But it's our duty to make it less so. As H. Jackson Brown Jr. puts it, “Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.”

It’s a problem which is worthy of contemplating deeply no matter who we are, no matter what we are doing now, no matter how we decide to deal with this dilemma in our ways.

What is your understanding of fairness, and what would you do to make this world a fair one? 

Agree to Disagree

The phrase “agree to disagree” first appeared in print in 1770 in a memorial sermon, but later on it became a kind of doctrine as one of the choices to resolve conflicts. It is a perfect state when people could reach agreement in situations with diverse views, yet when such a perfect state cannot be realized conflicts can be also resolved by reaching an agreement whereby both sides tolerate but do not accept the views, opinions or position of the other side. Both sides typically “agree to disagree” where they recognize that further conflict is unnecessary, ineffective or otherwise undesirable. They may also remain on amicable terms while continuing to disagree.

“Agree to disagree” in some way share similar values with “to seek common ground while reserving differences” which had been Premier Zhou Enlai’s diplomatic strategy during the 1970s. However, in some other fields, this doctrine might not really apply, as the American economist Frank J. Fabozzi argues that it is not rational for investors to agree to disagree; they must work toward consensus even if they have different information.

Make a speech on “agree to disagree” as to your understanding.

最终定题演讲题目花落谁家，将于5月18日由大赛组委会讨论决定，敬请期待~

周四见！