Practice

Practice 1: Social Media (the 2025 question)

Hints: types of social media - connecting with the world - uses - advantages and disadvantages - precautions.

Respected Principal, teachers and my dear friends,

I am XXXX, the President of our Youth Club. Today I wish to say a few words about the impact of social media on the youth.

We live among many kinds of social media: WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and more. They connect us with the whole world within seconds. We use them to study, to share our ideas, to find work and to keep in touch with our families. They bring us knowledge, friendship and opportunity. However, they also swallow our time, disturb our sleep and spread false news. Therefore we must set limits on our screen time, protect our passwords, and check the truth of a message before we forward it.

Let us make social media our tool and not our master. Thank you.

Practice 2: Save Water

Hints: water on the earth - how little is drinkable - who suffers most - how water is wasted - what we can do.

Respected teachers and my dear friends,

I am XXXX, the secretary of our Eco Club, and I wish to speak today on saving water.

Water covers almost three-fourths of our earth, and yet less than one per cent of it can be drunk. In many villages women and girls still walk kilometres to fetch a few pots, and when a well dries up, it is the girls who are kept away from school. Meanwhile we waste water in our own homes, in leaking taps, in long baths and in washing vehicles. Therefore let us repair every leaking tap, close the tap while brushing, reuse water in the garden and harvest the rain that falls on our roofs.

Every drop we save today is a drop someone will drink tomorrow. Thank you.

Practice 3: Plant Trees

Hints: what trees give us - what we are losing - examples of tree lovers - what students can do - an appeal.

Respected Principal, teachers and dear friends,

I am XXXX, speaking on behalf of our Nature Club about planting and protecting trees.

Trees give us the air we breathe, shade in the heat, fruit, firewood and soil that does not wash away. Yet every year we lose thousands of them to roads, buildings and carelessness. We have examples before us: villagers who hugged trees to save a forest, and a village woman in our own state who planted and cared for hundreds of banyan trees along a road. As students we too can plant a sapling for every birthday, water the young trees near our homes and refuse to waste paper.

Let us plant today what will shelter someone in twenty years. Thank you.

Practice 4: The Value of Reading

Hints: what books give us - reading and screens - the library - a habit to build - an appeal.

Respected teachers and my dear friends,

I am XXXX, the secretary of our Reading Club, and I wish to say a few words on the value of reading.

A book gives us more than information. It gives us patience, imagination and the company of minds we shall never meet. Today most of us read on screens, and a screen is quick but restless; a book teaches us to stay with one thought. Our library is open every day and holds hundreds of books that nobody has opened this year. If each of us borrows one book a fortnight and reads twenty pages a day, we shall finish more than twenty books before the exams.

Let us begin this week, with one book each. Thank you.

Practice 5: Road Safety

Hints: the problem - why accidents happen - who is affected - rules to follow - an appeal.

Respected elders and dear friends,

I am XXXX, the President of our Youth Club, and I wish to speak today on road safety.

Every year our country loses more than a lakh of lives on the roads, and many of them are young people. Most accidents happen not by accident but by choice: speed, mobile phones, no helmet, and a signal crossed because we were late. The loss falls on whole families, who lose an earning member in a moment. The rules are simple. Wear a helmet, use the seat belt, keep to your lane, never use a phone while riding and never ride after drinking.

Let us reach late rather than never. Thank you.

Practice 6: Write One Yourself

Topic: the importance of games and sports in a student's life. Hints: health - discipline and team spirit - relief from stress - time management - an appeal.

Write about 120 words in the four parts. Then check your speech against the list below.

[Exam Tip] — Notice that all five model speeches above have the same shape and differ only in the body. Learn the shape once. In the exam, the hints do the thinking for you: one sentence each, in order, joined with connectives.