Test 16 (c) — The Speech

A speech names both an occasion and an audience — a school assembly, a zonal competition, a literary association meeting. Both must be visible in the writing. A speech that could be read silently in a magazine has not been written as a speech.

Three features distinguish it from an article:

1. A salutation and a close. Sri Lankan convention opens with the chair, teachers and audience, and ends by thanking them.
2. Direct address. "You", "we", "my friends" — a speech is spoken at someone.
3. A call to action. An article may describe. A speech asks the room to do something before it leaves.

One thing here IS safe to reuse: the salutation and the closing thanks. They are a form, like the address block on a letter — the examiner expects them and there is no original way to say "good morning". Everything between them must be yours.

Everything else on this page follows the usual rule: copying prompt points verbatim awards 0 for Content, and the Zero-Content Gate then withholds every Language, Organisation and Mechanics mark.

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1. The Need of an Efficient Public Transport System for a Developing Country

Past paper — 2023, option (c). Occasion: the Zonal English Speech Competition.

Include the following: the modes of public transport · the benefits of a public transport system · disadvantages of an inefficient public transport system

Model answer (217 words)

Respected judges, teachers and my dear friends — a very good morning to you all.

This morning I ask you to consider something most of us complained about before we arrived here: the bus.

Our public transport takes several forms. Buses carry the greatest number by far, reaching villages no railway will ever serve. Trains move crowds along the coast and up to the hill country more cheaply than any road can. In our cities, three-wheelers and vans fill the gaps between them.

When such a system works well, the benefits reach everyone — including those who never use it. A student from a distant village can attend the school she earned a place at. A worker reaches a job that would otherwise be out of reach. Roads carry fewer private cars, so the air is cleaner and the journey shorter for all of us.

When it works badly, my friends, the cost falls hardest on those least able to bear it. An unreliable bus means arriving late and being marked absent. Crowded services are unsafe, particularly for women travelling alone. And a family that cannot rely on transport must spend on a motorcycle it cannot afford.

A developing country cannot afford a poor transport system. It is not a convenience. It is the machinery of opportunity.

Thank you.

What to steal

• The salutation and closing thanks — reuse these freely; they are a form.
• "Something most of us complained about before we arrived here" — the move of connecting to the room's shared experience in the first line.
• Direct address at the turn ("my friends") placed exactly where the argument becomes serious.
• A two-sentence close that reframes the subject from convenience to opportunity.

What NOT to steal

• The bus complaint opening, now that every reader of this page has it.

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2. How to choose your food wisely

Past paper — 2024, option (c). Occasion: the school assembly.

Include the following: types of food you eat · how you select them · why you select them

Model answer (213 words)

Good morning to our respected principal, to our teachers, and to all my friends.

I want to talk about a decision every one of us will make three times today, and will probably make badly.

Consider what we actually eat. There is the food prepared at home — rice, curry, vegetables from the market. There is what the canteen sells at the interval. And there is the third category we pretend is occasional: the packet of crisps, the coloured drink, the short-eat bought on the way home.

How do we select between them? Honestly, by taste, by price, and by what our friends are eating. We rarely turn the packet over. We rarely ask what is in the drink. The decision is made in four seconds, and mostly by habit.

Why we should choose more carefully is the part that matters. What we eat now sets habits that will last decades. A nutritious meal steadies concentration through a long afternoon; a sugary one raises it for twenty minutes and drops it during the lesson that follows. Diabetes and heart disease are rising in this country, and they begin with the ordinary choices of ordinary days.

I am not asking you to give anything up. I am asking you to choose on purpose.

Thank you.

What to steal

• "Three times today" — making the topic immediate and personal in the opening.
• Honest self-inclusion ("we rarely turn the packet over"). A speech that accuses the audience loses it; one that includes itself keeps it.
• The small final ask. "Choose on purpose" is achievable; "never eat crisps" is ignored.

What NOT to steal

• The four-seconds detail, and the closing ask — both are now spent.

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3. The Importance of Reading

Past paper — 2025, option (c). Occasion: the English Literary Association meeting. Purpose: persuade your audience of the benefits reading offers.

Include the following: expands vocabulary and improves the ability to communicate effectively · provides access to a wealth of information · broadens our understanding of various subjects

Model answer (202 words)

Respected teachers and fellow members of the Literary Association — good afternoon.

There is a habit available to all of us, costing nothing at a public library, that improves almost everything else we attempt. Very few of us practise it daily.

Reading builds vocabulary in the only way that lasts. Words learned from a list are forgotten by Friday; words met inside a story stay, because they arrive attached to a situation. And a larger vocabulary is not decoration — it is the difference between knowing what you mean and being able to say it.

Reading also gives access. Almost everything worth knowing has been written down by someone who spent years learning it. A reader can consult a surgeon, a historian and a farmer in a single afternoon, and none of them will be too busy.

Most valuable of all, it broadens understanding. A novel set in a village you have never visited does something no argument can: it lets you occupy another person's position for two hundred pages. That is where empathy is practised.

So my request is small. Twenty minutes a day, on anything at all — a newspaper, a novel, a translated classic. Twenty minutes is one bus journey.

Thank you.

What to steal

• Withholding the subject for one sentence ("a habit available to all of us"). It makes the audience lean in.
• Distinguishing list-learning from context-learning — a specific mechanism, not a general claim.
• Converting the ask into a familiar unit ("twenty minutes is one bus journey").

What NOT to steal

• The bus-journey equivalence. Excellent once.

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4. A tree for every student

Unseen practice prompt. Occasion: the school assembly.

Include the following: why trees matter here · what the school could do · who would maintain them · what you are asking the audience to do

Model answer (200 words)

Good morning, respected principal, teachers and my dear friends.

There are six hundred of us in this hall. I want to suggest that by next year there should be six hundred more trees on this land, and that each of us should own one.

Trees matter here in ways we feel without naming. They drop the temperature of a classroom by several degrees, which anyone who has sat by the western windows in April understands. They hold soil that would otherwise reach the canal at the first heavy rain. They bring back birds, and a school with birds in it is a pleasanter place to think.

The school could begin this term. The boundary strip is unused. Saplings suited to this soil are available cheaply, and several parents work in agriculture and would advise us.

Maintenance is where such schemes usually fail, so let us settle it first. Each student plants one sapling and waters it for one year. Your name goes on it. When you leave, you hand it to a Grade 6 student — and that is how a tree outlives the person who planted it.

What I am asking is one afternoon and one bucket a week.

Thank you.

What to steal

• Using the room's own number ("six hundred of us"). Nothing localises a speech faster.
• Naming the usual failure before it is objected to ("maintenance is where such schemes usually fail").
• The handover mechanism. A concrete answer to "what happens after we leave" turns a wish into a plan.

What NOT to steal

• The hand-it-to-a-Grade-6-student image, now that it is written down here.

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5. Failing well

Unseen practice prompt. Occasion: the school prize-giving.

Include the following: why this is an odd subject for prize-giving · what failure teaches · what unhelpful responses look like · your message to those who won nothing

Model answer (208 words)

Respected chief guest, principal, teachers, parents and friends — good evening.

At a prize-giving, someone should say a word for the people not collecting anything. Tonight I would like that to be me.

Most of us in this hall will not be called to this stage. That is not a failure of character; it is arithmetic. There are twelve prizes and six hundred of us.

Failure teaches what success cannot. A student who is corrected learns where the edge of their understanding actually lies, which a student who was right learns nothing about. Perseverance is only built by something that resists. Every person on this stage tonight has failed at more things than they have won.

There are unhelpful ways to respond, and we know them all. Pretending not to have cared. Deciding the whole subject is not for us. Or the quiet one — never attempting anything uncertain again.

So to everyone sitting still tonight: this evening measures twelve things. It does not measure how you treat a friend in difficulty, how hard you tried at something you found frightening, or who you will be at thirty.

Come back next year and try for one of these. And if you do not win it, come back again.

Thank you.

What to steal

• Choosing the unexpected angle on a familiar occasion — it is the fastest route to "original insight" in the Content descriptor.
• Arithmetic instead of comfort ("twelve prizes and six hundred of us"). Honesty reads as respect.
• Naming the wrong responses so the audience recognises themselves.

What NOT to steal

• The final repetition ("come back again"). A good closing rhythm, now used.

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6. The people who clean up after us

Unseen practice prompt. Occasion: the school assembly.

Include the following: who they are and what they do · how they are usually treated · why this matters beyond politeness · what you want to change

Model answer (209 words)

Good morning, respected principal, teachers and friends.

I want to name three people. Most of us walk past them every day and could not tell you their names, so I will: they are the men and women who clean this school.

They arrive before us and leave after us. They clean what we drop in the corridor, the canteen and the toilets. When a bottle is left on a desk on Friday, someone removes it before Monday — and it is not a teacher and it is not us.

How are they usually treated? Mostly with silence. Not cruelty — just the particular invisibility we reserve for people whose work we would rather not think about. We step around them as if they were furniture.

This matters beyond good manners. A school teaches by what it permits. If we learn here that some work is beneath noticing, we will carry that assumption into every workplace we enter, and we will hand it to our own children.

What I want to change is small and immediate. Learn one name this week. Carry your own plate to the counter. Do not drop what you would not pick up.

They already do their work. The least we can do is see it.

Thank you.

What to steal

• A promise the speech then keeps ("I want to name three people… so I will").
• Refusing the exaggerated charge ("not cruelty — just invisibility"). Precision about the wrong makes the remedy credible.
• Three concrete actions, each doable before lunch.

What NOT to steal

• The closing line. Strong, and now used.

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7. Why we should read our own history

Unseen practice prompt. Occasion: the English Literary Association meeting.

Include the following: how history is usually met at school · what is lost by that · what reading it properly gives us · a practical suggestion

Model answer (204 words)

Respected teachers and fellow members — good afternoon.

Most of us met our history as a list of dates to be returned on a Tuesday morning and forgotten by Thursday. I want to argue that we were given the syllabus and missed the subject.

What is lost by that is considerable. A date is not a fact about people; it is a label on one. We learn that a tank was built at Polonnaruwa without ever asking who dug it, what they ate, or how a society organised irrigation on that scale without a single machine. We memorise the arrival of colonial powers without reading a single sentence written by someone alive at the time.

Reading it properly gives us two things. It gives perspective: almost every problem we call modern has a version five hundred years old, and knowing the older version makes us less frightened of ours. And it gives a defence — a person who knows their own history is much harder to tell a convenient story about.

My practical suggestion is this. This Association should choose one primary source a term — a chronicle passage, a letter, a colonial record — and read it together. Not a textbook summary. The actual words.

Thank you.

What to steal

• "Given the syllabus and missed the subject" — the shape of a contrast that names the problem exactly.
• Turning a memorised fact into a question (who dug the tank, what did they eat). That is how you show depth on a familiar topic.
• A suggestion the audience can enact themselves — this Association, this term.

What NOT to steal

• The Polonnaruwa example, now used here.

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8. Staying safe online

Unseen practice prompt. Occasion: the school assembly.

Include the following: the risks students actually face · why the usual advice fails · what to do if something goes wrong · your request to the audience

Model answer (210 words)

Good morning, respected principal, teachers and my dear friends.

I am not going to tell you to stay off the internet. You would ignore me, and you would be right to.

The risks we actually face are not the ones in the posters. They are: a stranger who is patient and friendly for three weeks before asking for anything; a photograph shared with one person and then with forty; an account borrowed by someone who knows your password because you told them when you were friends. Money is rarely the target. Trust is.

The usual advice fails because it is unusable. "Do not talk to strangers" describes every group chat we are in. "Tell an adult" ignores the reason we do not — we are afraid the response will be to take the phone away, which punishes the person who was harmed.

So here is what to do if something goes wrong. Stop replying. Screenshot everything before you block anyone. Tell one adult who you believe will help rather than confiscate — a teacher, an aunt, an older cousin. It is not your fault, and it is not too late.

My request is simple: be the friend someone can tell. That is worth more than any setting on any application.

Thank you.

What to steal

• Disarming the expected lecture in the first line — it buys the audience's attention for the rest.
• Naming why standard advice fails. This is the "original insight" the Content descriptor rewards.
• Actionable steps in order (stop, screenshot, tell) — a speech under pressure should be rememberable.

What NOT to steal

• "Be the friend someone can tell." It is the best line here and therefore the most detectable.

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9. Kindness in a competitive year

Unseen practice prompt. Occasion: the school assembly, at the start of the O/L year.

Include the following: what this year does to a group · why students hide help · what is lost by that · what you are proposing

Model answer (203 words)

Good morning, respected principal, teachers and my friends.

This is the year we have been told about since Grade 6. I want to say something about what it does to a class, rather than to a student.

A competitive year quietly changes a group. Notes stop circulating. A question asked aloud starts to feel like an admission. People who sat together for five years begin measuring themselves against each other, and a room of friends becomes a room of rankings.

We hide help because we think the marks are a fixed quantity — that what you gain, I lose. It feels true and it is not. The grade thresholds do not move because you explained quadratic equations to the person behind you.

What is lost is more than kindness. Explaining something is the single most effective way of learning it properly. A class that shares notes revises twice: once in writing them, once in teaching them. We are hiding the method that works.

So I propose something modest. Share the notes. Answer the question. Ask the person who has stopped speaking in class whether they are all right.

We will be sitting the same papers. We do not have to sit them alone.

Thank you.

What to steal

• Shifting the unit of concern from student to class. Choosing a less obvious subject is where original insight comes from.
• Correcting a belief rather than urging a virtue ("the marks are not a fixed quantity"). Argument beats exhortation.
• The self-interested case for kindness — much more persuasive to a stressed audience than a moral one.

What NOT to steal

• The final two lines. Rhythmic, memorable, and now on a public page.

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10. What our generation owes

Unseen practice prompt. Occasion: the Zonal English Speech Competition.

Include the following: what has been given to us · what volunteering actually involves · common objections from students · your call to action

Model answer (208 words)

Respected judges, teachers and fellow competitors — good morning.

Nothing any of us has was built by us. The school we sit in, the road we travelled on, the free education that put me on this stage — every one of them was paid for by people who did not know our names and will never meet us.

Volunteering is how that account is partly settled. It is less dramatic than it sounds. It is two hours at a clinic, a Saturday clearing a canal, tutoring a Grade 4 student who has nobody at home able to help with English. It is not heroic, and it is not supposed to be.

I know the objections, because I have made them. We have no time in an examination year. We are students, not officials. And what difference does one afternoon make anyway?

The answer to the last one is the only one that matters. One afternoon makes very little difference. Four hundred students giving one afternoon each is eight hundred hours, and eight hundred hours rebuilds something.

So my call is not for a lifetime of service. It is for one Saturday, this term, together.

We inherited a country we did not build. The rent falls due in our generation.

Thank you.

What to steal

• Establishing the debt before asking for payment — the whole speech rests on the first paragraph.
• Voicing objections in the first person ("because I have made them"). It disarms resistance.
• Answering only the strongest objection, and with arithmetic.

What NOT to steal

• The final metaphor. It is the strongest sentence on this page, and that is exactly why it must not appear in your paper.