English Poetry Competition of 2023
Enter your poem for a chance to win something! Our poetry contest is held twice a year. Write a poem about how the pandemic (疫情) has changed your life.
Prizes
The contest awards one first place prize of $2,000 and a first prize wall plaque ($100 value); twenty second place prizes of $100 each and a second place wall plaque ($75 value); one hundred third place winners of a third place wall plaque ($25 value).
Rules
Follow all rules carefully to prevent disqualification (取消资格).
IMPORTANT:
☆Poet must be at least thirteen years of age.
☆Only one poem per person is allowed.
☆A poem in its entirety must be an original work by the person centering the contest.
☆All entries are judged anonymously (匿名地). Please do not include your name, address, phone number, etc., or your entry will be disqualified.
Deadline: Email your entry by 31st May 2023.
Length: 42 lines max. No minimum. Title not included in the line count.
Format: Entries must be typed. We do not accept handwritten submissions.
Fees: £10 per poem.
Judging: The judges' decision is final and no individual correspondence (通信) can be entered into. Judges are unable to comment on individual entries. Judging is fair.
Copyright: Worldwide copyright of each entry remains with the author but the Bridport Prize has unrestricted rights to publish the winning and highly praised poems.
Before I can tell you what happened to me, you first must learn about my job: perform underwater repairs. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to office. It's a wet suit.
This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is a water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment that sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature. It then pumps it down to the diver (潜水员) through a garden pipe.
Now, this all sounds like a wonderful plan, and I've used it several times.
What I do when I get to the bottom is take the pipe and stuff it down the back of my wet suit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It's fantastic.
Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my bottom started to itch(痒). So, of course, I scratched(挠) it.
This, of course, only made things worse. Within a few seconds my bottom started to feel hot. I pulled the pipe out from my back, thinking that maybe the water was too hot, but the damage was done.
In pain, I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish (水母) and pumped it directly into my suit. Now, since I don't have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn't stick to it.
I immediately informed the dive director of my situation over the communicator. His reply was unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically.
Needless to say, I gave up the dive. As I climbed out of the water, the doctor, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my bottom. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't poop (排泄) for two days because my bottom was swollen.
So, next time you're having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your bottom.
Now repeat to yourself, "I love my job, I love my job, I love my job." May you NEVER have a jellyfish bad day.
Every Saturday, Wang Fokun travels 40 minutes to watch a movie with friends. Wang, 64, lost his sight in his early 50s after experiencing a high degree of nearsightedness (近视), but in the past two years, a "talking film"club has enabled him to regain his love for the cinema.
The club is held in Kunming, where volunteers give vivid narrations (解说) to an audience including blind and partly sighted moviegoers. One volunteer, Yifan, has narrated more than 20 movies, doing so for the first time to an audience of more than 80 in November 2022. He said, "If I cannot complete the introduction to one scene before the characters start talking in the next, the trick is to wait until the end of the dialogue, go back to the previous scene and then explain the new one. This requires a narrator to be familiar with all the plots and scenes in a movie so I watch a
film at least three or four times and write down details of the script (剧本). However, seeing the audience members absorbed in the movie, laughing when something funny happened and sighing during sad scenes, I could sense they were enjoying the film. I was so glad that I could bring enjoyment to my audience by narrating the movie. I felt as though I was shining a different light on their lives. "
Volunteers for the "talking movie" club learned their narrating skills from Zhou Quan, the founder of Xin Deng
Theater. Inspired by Xin Mu Theater in Beijing -- a small group of volunteers who were the first to introduce films to blind audiences in China, he founded Xin Deng Theater in Kunming in 2020 and has narrated more than 100 films for thousands of blind moviegoers. "Movies are for everybody. Just because somebody is blind, can't he/she enjoy a film?" Zhou said. "Xin Deng Theater wants to help such people watch movies and to light up their lives."
Reading people's minds seems to be a superpower that only exists in movies. But scientists have now made it possible to translate people's brain waves!
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco developed a new device. It can turn brain waves into words on a screen in front of the user. In the study, they tested it with a paralyzed (瘫痪) man.
"To our knowledge, this is the first successful demonstration of direct decoding (破译) of full words from the brain of someone who is paralyzed and cannot speak." said Edward Chang, the senior author of the study. Each year, thousands of people lose the ability to speak due to accidents or diseases. With up to 93 percent accuracy(准确性), the new device shows "strong promise" to let these people fully communicate in the future.
One problem with such mind-reading machines, however, is that they have to put electrodes into people's brains.
It's inconvenient and has health risks. But scientists from the University of Texas, US, have taken steps to change this. They tried to translate people's thoughts without even touching their heads, reported Live Science.
The new brain scanning technique is called FMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging. It's a safer way of "reading" brain activity. Active brain cells have more oxygen. By tracking this, scientists can translate brain activity.
The team asked participants to listen to 16 hours of radio shows while scanning their brains. Then they used a computer algorithm (算法) to create a story based on the FMRI recording. It matched the radio shows pretty well.
In other tests, the algorithm could basically explain the story of a silent movie that the participants watched. It could even retell a story that the participants imagined in their heads. Although it's not a word-for-word translation, the technique provides many possibilities.
Personal
Development is not just a simple personality improvement plan, but also a process to improve your life. The outcome of this helps you fight all those challenges to deal with any of the uncontrollable aspects of your personality. This is a process that helps build the base to handle any of the off-track situations.
Develop positive attitude:This helps you behave and maintain your personality traits (特性) to a normal level, even in the extreme conditions. This makes a very useful element towards building the positive attitude in life.
Communicate effectively: Our personality is basically identified on the basis of the type of communication we are able to perform. A person is shy if he/ she lacks an easy open communication.. Thus, a personal development plan helps improve on the communication grounds as well.
: When one is confident about oneself, the confidence is well reflected in whatever we do. A finely created Personal Development Program contributes to this self-confidence, therefore adding a greater value to inner strength.
Bring out your hidden talents: Personal Growth and Development programs are designed in such forms to bring out the hidden yet beneficial personality characteristics within every person. This helps in moving ahead in life and achieving the expected goals easily.
Thus, Personal Development can help extract (提取) the vital traits out of a personality and add value to other needed traits..
A. A positive personality helps and motivates your inner self
B. However, an outgoing person has the ability to communicate openly
C. But a confident person is able to fight for his\ her dream
D. Here are the reasons why personal development is important
E. Raise your self-respect
F. This will also add to your personality and help to move ahead in life
G. Develop inner strength and confidence
When I was a boy, I spent much time playing alone. I didn't1playing alone, though. I lived outside town, next to a forest where oaks (橡树) were my2. I would sit in their shade and enjoy their peace.
Therefore it was so3for me when I was in4in a wood processing factory. It wasn't just the back-breaking work, long5, and low pay. It was also seeing trees being cut. The red oak tree were6affected because they made the prettiest hardwood flooring.
One afternoon after a long day's work, I decide to take a walk in the7. As I wandered, I was filled with 8for childhood days. Feeling so down, I dropped my head and that was when I9it: a red oak acorn (橡子) that had somehow10hungry animals all winter long. Something I'd read once11me at that moment "An acorn will12a forest eventually if it wants!" I smiled, and carefully13that little acorn.
Then I headed home, no longer14, for I also realized in our life we all15as an acorn, but whether our future is a forest or not is up to us.
The closing ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics drew the two-week competition to an end. At the ceremony, willow twigs (柳条), a traditional Chinese farewell (告别) gift (exchange) between friends when parting, were used to express China's wishes to the athletes and the world.
In Chinese, the pinyin for the word "willow" (pronounce) the same as the word for "stay". In ancient China, when friends were separating, they would pick a willow twig and give it to the person who (leave) to express their wish for him/her to stay.
The closing ceremony gave life to the tradition in the (perform) — "Moment of Remembrance".
Eighty dancers held willow twig lights and walked (slow) to the center of the stadium to Farewell Song. Meanwhile, an ancient painting of weeping willows appeared on the LED screen, and 365 people appeared. They carried glowing (发光的) "willow twigs" and walked to the center of the screen.
Songbie or Farewell Song, was written in 1915, has become popular since then. Well suited to this touching send-off presentation, song was the final choice after more than 20 attempts (find) what resonated (引起共鸣) the most with the closure of the Games.
"Different (style) of music had been created for the Games, but in Director Zhang Yimou's view, it was more appropriate to choose music that is familiar everyone," Huang Hui, the program director, said.
Yoghurt
It was a rough week. The price of oil skyrocketed as the temperature dropped sharply in Maine. We were looking at a high of eight degrees that week, and I had missed three days of work so my paycheck was going to be lower than normal. I was stressed, to say the least. I shopped strategically(有策略地), looking for every possible way to cut pennies so I could buy groceries and keep the house warm.
My eight-year-old son didn't understand when I told him we were struggling that week. He wanted a special kind of yoghurt, but I didn't have the extra three dollars to buy it for him. It was the kind of yoghurt with a cartoon kid riding a skateboard on the front of the box, and a mere two spoonfuls（一勺的量） in each cup. It was the kind of product that wastes a parent's money and makes me hate advertising.
I felt guilty（内疚的） as a parent when those big eyes looked at me with confusion, as if to say, "It's just yoghurt. What's the big deal?" So I found a way. I put something back as single mothers often do. He got his yoghurt. On the way driving back from the grocery store, I noticed a homeless man holding a sign by the side of the road.
My heart hurt, and I tried not to look at him. I watched people stay away from him on the street and walk by without even meeting his eyes. My son didn't seem to care much, either. I looked at the man closely then — bare hands grasping a piece of cardboard, snot（鼻涕） frozen to his face, a worn-out jacket. And there I was struggling because
I had to buy oil and groceries. But I decided to help. I pulled over to the man and handed him a five-dollar bill.
Paragraph 1:
Seeing this, my son became confused and surprised.
Paragraph 2:
On that day, my son performed an act that most adults wouldn't have done.
