1. Chapter 10 Opening a Speech Background Information A Quote A Statement of Purpose A Question Speech by Summers

2. 10.1 Background Information  Wandering around any bookshop in Japan, you might easily find love stories and romance fictions on the bestseller bookshelf, and they are often made into portable pocketbooks. This may be also the case in many other countries, but Japanese love stories seem to show a distinctive and astonishing characteristic, that is, most of them tend to have an unhappy ending. Japanese seem to love what they can never get and show more affection for love that flowers and fades in a flash. 

3. 10.2 A Quote  To begin my speech, I would love to share with you some lines from a poem which appear in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden or Life in the Woods. The lines are also quoted in the movie “Dead Poets Society”.  “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to confront only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived.”

4. 10.3 A Statement of Purpose  Good afternoon, everyone! Today I’m going to talk about why I chose Medicine as my major and later on, in my interview part, you may ask me something about PUMC-Peking Union Medical School. But before I start my speech, I would like to show you a few pictures here.

5. 10.4 A Question  What is success? Different people have different ideas, because the hopes and the goals they cherish vary from one another. There may be so many kinds of success in the world that I can’t tell them all. So maybe it’s difficult to define success. But, in my opinion, it’s easy to define what failure is. There is only one failure. It is called never trying.

6. 10.4 Speech by Summers  Today, I speak from this podium a final time as your president. As I depart, I want to thank all of you – students, faculty, alumni and staff – with whom I have been privileged to work over these past five years. Some of us have had our disagreements, but I know that which unites us transcends that which divides us.

7. Comment  The speaker starts his speech with a heavy heart as several words signify it such as ‘final’, ‘disagreement’, and ‘divide’.

8. Topic for Debate:  Knowledge of the humanities contributes more to mankind than that of the natural sciences.

9. The End!