From October 3 to 5, the 27th China Daily “21st Century Cup” English Speech Contest National Final was held as scheduled. The finals of this competition were held online. After fierce competitions at various levels, such as campus trials and regional competitions, Tang Hongyan, a 2019 undergraduate from the Department of Translation, College of Foreign Languages of Nankai University, as the runner up of Tianjin, was successfully promoted to the national finals and finally won the third prize of the national championship. Shi Yuchen, a teacher from the Department of Translation, won the instructor award.
The national finals were divided into two rounds, the semi-final and the final. More than 70 outstanding contestants were selected from more than 30 competition areas across the country. The semi-final included prepared speech, impromptu speech and on-site Q&A. The prepared speech required the contestants to make a speech around the specified theme, and the judges would judge the speech from the three dimensions of speech content, language quality and comprehensive impression. The topic of the keynote speech of this national semi-final was “From zero-sum game to win-win situation”. Tang Hongyan, taking the board game of “Monopoly” as a metaphor, explained the characteristics and defects of the zero-sum game in simple terms, and expressed her thoughts on the history of China’s Silk Road and the reality of the “the Belt and Road” in combination with cultural exchanges with Iranian friends in daily life. Finally, Tang Hongyan concluded with Shakespeare’s “the world is your oyster”, pointing out the feasibility of creating a win-win result from the national to the individual level, and the necessity for the world’s youth to have an open and inclusive mentality, showing the rich cultural literacy and outstanding literary heritage of Nankai students.
The impromptu speech section focused on the daily accumulation and comprehensive quality of the contestants. The contestants randomly selected speech topics and need to brainstorm in a limited time to answer. In this link, Tang Hongyan combined China’s cultural tradition of openness and inclusiveness with the historical action of science and technology sharing, explained the global sharing of scientific data of China’s solar exploration satellite “Xihe”, and vividly expounded the necessity of international cooperation and China’s exemplary role in the face of international problems, showed a beautiful picture of China building a community with a shared future for mankind in the field of science and technology. Tang Hongyan was fully affirmed by the judges and finally won the third prize of the National Award in the following questions part.
The “21st Century Cup” National College English Speech Contest was founded by China Daily in 1996. As the most academic and organized English learning contest in China, it has always been strongly supported and highly valued by international authoritative English teaching institutions and education related departments. After the students of the College of Foreign Languages won the first and third national prizes respectively in the 24th and 25th competitions, this is the third time that the college students have given a good performance in the “21st Century Cup” national finals.
