外语节英文演讲稿

外语节英文演讲稿

Thesis: Tradition in modern times

●胡大炜

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen!

My name is David. I’m very glad to join you with the discussion of “tradition in modern times and my topic is “Why don’t we make modern and tradition friends”.

I went to Britain on the school exchange program last summer. Till now I can still remember the feeling I got when we landed back on China. There was something twisting my heart, making me extremely unfortable. Later I found out it was the grim and cold modern buildings along the way back to school. Tall as they were, they looked expressionless. Shining as they were, they looked so unreal.

However, when I was walking down the streets of London or Liverpool, what I saw was the ancient buildings gracefully

stretching themselves out in front of me, yet leaving no sign of conflicting with the roadsters that roared down the street. On recollecting the marvelous scene, it ours to me that modern and tradition aren’t born to be enemies. Then

I can’t stop wondering why they are so inpatible in China. Old buildings are cruelly replaced by skyscrapers; Peking opera’s popularity is never to beat that of the casually made idol TV series. In a word, new things can’t wait to displace the old. It’s wired, isn’t it? Modernization should not be simple replacement but development after all.

I didn’t get the answer that could orientate me out of my confusion until I went to Australia this winter. As the highlighted part of the tour, we went to see the

traditional performance of the aborigines. During the show, one of the aborigines slightly injured his knee due to the exceedingly passionate primitive dance, forcing him to

totter down from the stage when the show was over. What was shocking was that no one in the audience seemed to have been aware of this. They applauded. They cheered. Yet they still left their seats without even a glance at him. If any, the emotion in their eyes was like watching the

monkeys in the zoo. I couldn’t feel more sympathetic to him and when passing him I whispered: ”are your knees ok?” Surprisingly, he seemed too thrilled to speak anything. He only uttered: “wha??ah!......ya……” with bubbling laughter in the end of the series of simple words. “Take care” I said to him. He immediately replied

“Yeah!”, clapping me on the back.

I felt warmth. Yet I also felt a chill. The answer then jumped out itself: like the pitiless tourists, we labeled ourselves as modern citizens. Meanwhile we took up the mask of arrogance which prevented us from taking a good look at tradition. That gave no chance of interaction between tradition and modern, thereby making them the seemingly inpatible enemies.

Such attitude is horribly dangerous. With the label “modern”, we are always trying to put us in the highest point of the mountain of history. Yet we have forgotten

that without the stones of tradition under our foot, we may easily fall down from it. The hazardous consequences have actually been shown by Charlie Chaplin in his famous silent