21世纪英语演讲比赛初中组

历届比赛一览

第三届“21世纪杯”全国英语演讲比赛冠军——梁励敏

梁励敏

北京外国语大学

梁励敏，生于浙江杭州，毕业于北京外国语大学，获英语语言文学硕士学位，研究生期间专攻方向为美国社会研究。2002年进入中央电视台英语频道采访组工作，所采写的新闻获得2003年全国新闻彩虹奖二等奖。

专家点评:引用文学大师的诗句作为开场白，与结束语首尾呼应，颇有感染力。东西方文化的融合表现得十分鲜明，意味深长，是篇优秀的演讲。

crossing the sea

good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. the title of my speech today is crossing the sea. an english poet by the name of rudyard kipling once wrote in his poem we and they:

all the people like us are we

and everyone else is they

we live over the sea

while they live over the way

we eat pork and beef with cowhorn-handled knives

they who gobble their rice off a leaf

are horrified out of their lives.

when these lines first caught my eyes, i was shocked-how could two peoples remain so isolated and ignorant of each other in the past? todays society, of course, is an entirely different picture. those people who used to eat with cowhorn-handled knives might be very skillful in using chopsticks, and those people who used to gobble their rice might be as well have taken to fish and chips.

indeed, just take china as an example: our modern life has been influenced by western style of living in so many ways that its no longer surprising to see teenagers going crazy about rock-and-roll, whole families dining out at mcdonalds and even rather elderly people dressed in apple jeans.

however, these are only some expressions of the cultural changes taking place in our society today. what is really going on is a subtle but significant restructuring of the nations mentality. just look around.

it is therefore evident that we as descendants of an ancient eastern civilization are already living under strong inf1uence of the western culture. but it is not only in china that we find the incorporation of the two cultures.

take the chinese acupuncture as another example: this traditional treatment of diseases is finally finding its way to the west and hence the underlying notion that illness is resulted from the imbalance between yin and yang within the body -- an idea which would strike any westerner as incredible in the past!

ladies and gentlemen, we live in a great epoch when the global integration of economy and the information revolution have brought cultures of the world closer than ever before. we live in a particular era when countries, east and west, find themselves in need of readjusting their traditional values. we live, at the same time, at a critical juncture of our evolution because such problems as ethnic conflicts and