The importance of reading newspaper.

As the name suggests newspapers are a source of news and information. In several respects they are also a medium of communication among the peoples of the world.

Today there are hundreds of newspapers all over the world. Everywhere there is a keen desire to learn more and more about the affairs of the world. This is partly the result ofthe spread of education which sharpens one’s curiosity to learn about distant lands.

As a source of news, the newspaper is almost indispensable to those whose thirst for knowledge is insatiable. They contain news on events in distant corners of the earth. Information about such events arrives almost immediately. As a result, people everywhere are informed about the most important event in the world very quickly and almost at the same time. For example, if a war breaks out in one part of the world today, the people in the other parts will certainly come to know about it tomorrow. As a result, all the countries of the world are able to do something quickly to help those who have suffered because of the war or to persuade the countries at war to cease fighting.

Newspaper also play an important part in keeping the people of the world informed about the troubles that might arise in the future, if nothing is done to prevent them from happening. For example, if a dispute arises between the two countries for any reason, the newspapers can keep the people of the world informed about what might happen if nothing is done to persuade the two countries to resolve their differences peacefully.
In this way many wars have been avoided because of the intervention of some countries in the disputes of many countries which were given prominence in newspapers.

When all this is considered, we feel that there is some silent communication among countries through the medium of newspapers for the common benefit of the countries of the world.

Further, constant reading of newspapers improves one’s outlook on life and makes one a more reasonable person. The importance of the newspaper is therefore obvious.

The importance of reading newspaper.

As the name suggests newspapers are a source of news and information. In several respects they are also a medium of communication among the peoples of the world.

Today there are hundreds of newspapers all over the world. Everywhere there is a keen desire to learn more and more about the affairs of the world. This is partly the result ofthe spread of education which sharpens one’s curiosity to learn about distant lands.

As a source of news, the newspaper is almost indispensable to those whose thirst for knowledge is insatiable. They contain news on events in distant corners of the earth. Information about such events arrives almost immediately. As a result, people everywhere are informed about the most important event in the world very quickly and almost at the same time. For example, if a war breaks out in one part of the world today, the people in the other parts will certainly come to know about it tomorrow. As a result, all the countries of the world are able to do something quickly to help those who have suffered because of the war or to persuade the countries at war to cease fighting.

Newspaper also play an important part in keeping the people of the world informed about the troubles that might arise in the future, if nothing is done to prevent them from happening. For example, if a dispute arises between the two countries for any reason, the newspapers can keep the people of the world informed about what might happen if nothing is done to persuade the two countries to resolve their differences peacefully.
In this way many wars have been avoided because of the intervention of some countries in the disputes of many countries which were given prominence in newspapers.

When all this is considered, we feel that there is some silent communication among countries through the medium of newspapers for the common benefit of the countries of the world.

Further, constant reading of newspapers improves one’s outlook on life and makes one a more reasonable person. The importance of the newspaper is therefore obvious.

Talk about your new friend

When the school reopened after the mid-year school holidays, we had a new classmate. Her name is Cheng Siew Hong and she has emigrated with her family from Hong Kong to Singapore.

The class was excited and I was too because she happened to sit next to me. My form teacher told us to make her feel at ease with us. Siew Hong is a cheerful-looking girl and an active athlete. She runs fast, swims well and even takes part in high-jump competitions. Siew Hong and I soon became very good friends because of our common interest in sports. We never run out of topics to talk about. We have lots of fun together, both in class and out on the field. I help Siew Hong cope with the Englishlanguage while she helps me out with the Chinese language.

Since this was the first time she has been in Singapore, the class decided to bring Siew Hong to some of the local tourist attractions like Sentosa and Botanic Garden. We also brought her to Satay Club fitted into the class in no time. She is glad to join our class and we are glad to have her as a new friend.

Talk about your good friend.

Chang is my neighbor. He is the same age as me. He is my best friend. He is also studying the same school. We go to school together.

Chang comes from an educated family. His father is a school principal. His mother is also a teacher. He is punctual, well-educated, and has amiable manners. He is hardworking. He does his homework and does well in his studies. He is well-dressed and well-behaved. All the teachers have a high opinion of him.

Chang has a well-built body. He is an early riser and jogs with me daily. He is gentle but fearless. He takes part in all sports, scout, trekking and mountaineering activities. He has a good heart. He is truthful, honest and obedient.

Chang is fond of pets. He has a pair of rabbits and parrots. He has two fish tanks containing gold fish. He patiently feeds them and looks after them with care. He has been trained by his parents to be neat and tidy. He has a room to himself. All his books are neatly arranged on the shelves. His bed is always neat and tidy. He plays badminton with me. He also plays the guitar. Though gardening is his favorite hobby, he is unable to do so because he lives in an apartment. He makes his parents very proud of him in examinations. He secures good marks and is usually top of his class in examinations. He is very helpful and helps me in my lesson. He inspires me to work harder. He keeps away from bad company.

Chang is a good son to his father. I am happy to have such a friend.

Describe your best friend and tell why you like him or her

In our daily activities we often get in touch with the others and from these relations we meet some people whose interests, characteristics and behaviors are similar to ours and we choose them as our friends.

To me, one of my best friends is Nam. Nam is only over eighteen but he is well developed; so he is thought to be twenty or more. He has black hair, a broad forehead, a straight nose and bright eyes. He is very good-looking. He has a kind heart and is easy to get on with everybody. We have been friends for a very long time. The deeper our mutualunderstanding becomes the more we feel closely attached to each other. “Birds of a feather flock together”, Nam and I are keen on learning. We are the best pupils in our class. Nam is always at the top. He is good at every subject, but he never shows pride in his abilities and always tries tolearn harder.

Nam’s family is not rich enough. His parents are retired workers. Realizing the hardships of his parents, although he is absorbed in his study, he often spends most of his spare time doing useful things to help his parents in their old age. He gets up early in the morning to have enough time to deliver newspapers to subscribers before going to school.After school in the afternoon, he repairs bicycles and motorbikes. Therefore the money he gets from his manual job is sufficient for his school fees and for his parents’ presents. I like Nam very much because of his honesty and straight forwardness. He is always ready to help his weak friends in their study; as a result, lots of friends, thanks to his whole-hearted help, have become good ones.

In my relation with Nam, I have got precious experience: thirst for learning, patience to overcome difficulties, helpfulness and filial piety.

Describe the house you are living in

Describe the house you are living in. Why do you love it?

The house we are living in is situated in the suburb of HCM city, within thirty minutes’ drive off the central city. We have lived there for more than twenty years. This is a fairly large house surrounded with a luxuriant garden.

My house consists of four bed-rooms, a living-room, a bathroom with a shower, a dinning-room, a kitchen and a toilet. It is air-conditioned and well-furnished. The living-room is decorated beautifully. Paintings by famous artists are hung on the walls. At night, the color neon lights increase the beauty and coziness of the room. There, on Sundays and holidays my father usually spends his time playing chess or drinking tea with his friends. My mother and my two sisters are diligent and hard-working women. They often keep the house clean and tidy.

On suffocating days of summer, we usually take meals in the garden. It is fairly cool and quiet here. We enjoy our meals amid the melodioustwitters of birds. On stormy and rainy nights all whole family members gather in the living-room, watching television or telling each other about their daily activities.

I love my house very much because it is the place where I was born and have grown up in the education of my father and in the tender loving care of my mother. I have spent my whole childhood in the love and affection of my dear ones with so many sweet memories.

Writing and speaking

March 2012

I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I were a better writer. What I really want is to have good ideas, and that's a much bigger part of being a good writer than being a good speaker.

Having good ideas is most of writing well. If you know what you're talking about, you can say it in the plainest words and you'll be perceived as having a good style. With speaking it's the opposite: having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker.

I first noticed this at a conference several years ago. There was another speaker who was much better than me. He had all of us roaring with laughter. I seemed awkward and halting by comparison. Afterward I put my talk online like I usually do. As I was doing it I tried to imagine what a transcript of the other guy's talk would be like, and it was only then I realized he hadn't said very much.

Maybe this would have been obvious to someone who knew more about speaking, but it was a revelation to me how much less ideas mattered in speaking than writing. [1]

A few years later I heard a talk by someone who was not merely a better speaker than me, but a famous speaker. Boy was he good. So I decided I'd pay close attention to what he said, to learn how he did it. After about ten sentences I found myself thinking "I don't want to be a good speaker."

Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction. For example, when I give a talk I usually write it out beforehand. I know that's a mistake; I know delivering a prewritten talk makes it harder to engage with an audience. The way to get the attention of an audience is to give them your full attention, and when you're delivering a prewritten talk your attention is always divided between the audience and the talk—even if you've memorized it. If you want to engage an audience it's better to start with no more than an outline of what you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences. But if you do that you could spend no more time thinking about each sentence than it takes to say it. [2] Occasionally the stimulation of talking to a live audience makes you think of new things, but in general this is not going to generate ideas as well as writing does, where you can spend as long on each sentence as you want.

If you rehearse a prewritten speech enough, you can get asymptotically close to the sort of engagement you get when speaking ad lib. Actors do. But here again there's a tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better. Actors don't face that temptation except in the rare cases where they've written the script, but any speaker does. Before I give a talk I can usually be found sitting in a corner somewhere with a copy printed out on paper, trying to rehearse it in my head. But I always end up spending most of the time rewriting it instead. Every talk I give ends up being given from a manuscript full of things crossed out and rewritten. Which of course makes me um even more, because I haven't had any time at all to practice the new bits. [3]

Depending on your audience, there are even worse tradeoffs than these. Audiences like to be flattered; they like jokes; they like to be swept off their feet by a vigorous stream of words. As you decrease the intelligence of the audience, being a good speaker is increasingly a matter of being a good bullshitter. That's true in writing too of course, but the descent is steeper with talks. Any given person is dumber as a member of an audience than as a reader. Just as a speaker ad libbing can only spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk can only spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to hear it. Plus people in an audience are always affected by the reactions of those around them, and the reactions that spread from person to person in an audience are disproportionately the more brutish sort, just as low notes travel through walls better than high ones. Every audience is an incipient mob, and a good speaker uses that. Part of the reason I laughed so much at the talk by the good speaker at that conference was that everyone else did. [4]

So are talks useless? They're certainly inferior to the written word as a source of ideas. But that's not all talks are good for. When I go to a talk, it's usually because I'm interested in the speaker. Listening to a talk is the closest most of us can get to having a conversation with someone like the president, who doesn't have time to meet individually with all the people who want to meet him.

Talks are also good at motivating me to do things. It's probably no coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as motivational speakers. That may be what public speaking is really for. It's probably what it was originally for. The emotional reactions you can elicit with a talk can be a powerful force. I wish I could say that force was more often used for good than ill, but I'm not sure.







Notes

[1] I'm not talking here about academic talks, which are a different type of thing. While the audience at an academic talk might appreciate a joke, they will (or at least should) make a conscious effort to see what new ideas you're presenting.

[2] That's the lower bound. In practice you can often do better, because talks are usually about things you've written or talked about before, and when you ad lib you end up reproducing some of those sentences. Like early medieval architecture, impromptu talks are made of spolia. Which feels a bit dishonest, incidentally, because you have to deliver these sentences as if you'd just thought of them.

[3] Robert Morris points out that there is a way in which practicing talks makes them better: reading a talk out loud can expose awkward parts. I agree and in fact I read most things I write out loud at least once for that reason.

[4] For sufficiently small audiences, it may not be true that being part of an audience makes people dumber. The real decline seems to set in when the audience gets too big for the talk to feel like a conversation—maybe around 10 people.