Question

It may help you to know that there is no such thing as a perfect speech. At some point in every speech, every speaker says something that is not understood exactly as he has planned. Fortunately, such moments are usually not obvious to the listeners, why? Because the listeners do not know what the speaker plans to say, they hear only what the speaker does say. If you lose your place for a moment, wrongly change the order of a couple of sentences, or forget to pause at a certain point, no one will be any the wiser. When such moments occur, don’t worry about them. Just continue as if nothing happened.

Even if you do make an obvious mistake during a speech, that doesn’t really matter. If you have ever listened to Martin Luther King’s famous speech—“I have a dream”, you may notice that he stumbles over his words twice during the speech. Most likely, however, you don’t remember. Why? Because you were fixing your attention on his message rather than on his way of speech-making. People care a lot about making mistakes in a speech because they regard speech-making as a kind of performance rather than as an act of communication. They feel the listeners are like judges in an ice-skating competition. But, in fact, the listeners are not looking for a perfect performance. They are looking for a well-thought-out speech that expresses the speaker’s ideas clearly and directly. Sometimes a mistake or two can actually increase a speaker’s attractiveness by making him more human.

As you work on your speech, don’t worry about being perfect. Once you free your mind of this, you will find it much easier to give your speech freely.

1. The underlined part in the first paragraph means that no one will _________.

A. be smarter than you

B. do better than you

C. notice your mistakes

D. know what you are talking about

2.You don’t remember obvious mistakes in a speech because _________.

A. you find the way of speech-making more important

B. you don’t fully understand the speech

C. you don’t know what the speaker plans to say

D. you attention is on the content

3.It can be inferred from the passage that _________.

A. one or two mistakes in a speech may not be bad

B. giving a speech is like giving a performance

C. the listeners should pay more attention to how a speech is made

D. the more mistake a speaker makes, the more attractive he will be

4. What would be the best title for the passage?

A. How to Be a Perfect Speaker

B. How to Make a Perfect Speech

C. Don’t Expect Mistakes in a Speech

D. Don’t Expect a Perfect Speech

Answer 1