另外一些人可以在工厂农村住几个月，在那里做调查，交朋友。

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am very honoured to have the opportunity to address such a distinguished audience of university presidents, vice-chancellors and accomplished scholars from around the world. I must congratulate theAssociation of University Presidents of China on its achievements since its establishment in 1997. [TONE]∥[TONE]

It is the first association of its kind, and it will be a strong force for enhancing academic cooperationbetween Hong Kong and the mainland and between China and the world. I also applaud the Associationfor organising this meaningful event which draws together so many top brains from around the world. Thesynergy it generates will point the way for the development of the global tertiary education sector into thenext century. [TONE]∥[TONE]

Today, whilst innovation and technology are the driving force of the world and fuel its engine, it is thepeople that make the engines work. We wish to see in our younger generation an all-round developmentcovering ethics, intellect, physique, social skills and aesthetics. We wish to see in our younger generations theability to assimilate modern technology and ideas. [TONE]∥[TONE]

We wish to see in our younger generation creativity, critical thinking and a global outlook. We wishto see in our younger generation a strength of character, a spirit of enterprise, the desire for continuousimprovement and the versatility to cope with the changing needs of our community. And we wish to see inour younger generation a sense of responsibility towards one's own family, one's own community, one's owncountry and indeed the world. [TONE]∥[TONE]

In Hong Kong we strongly believe education enables us to cultivate these noble qualities in our nextgeneration. Education also creates and expands the pool of talents to maintain Hong Kong's economicdevelopment and international competitiveness. That is why education is always one of our top priorities and continues to be the single biggest item of the Government's budget, accounting for 19% of our total public recurrent expenditure. Despite the economic downturn, public expenditure on education will have about 8%growth in real terms in this fiscal year. [TONE]∥[TONE]

Our best universities are among the top ten in the region, and our best students are among the best in theworld. However, the success ofHong Kong lies in our flexibility to respond to changes and our determinationfor improvement. We have to inject new life into the whole education sector. To achieve this, we areundergoing major reforms in our education system, our examination system, our education regulators, ourschools, our teachers and, above all, our attitude towards education. [TONE]∥[TONE]

Education is a continuum. The inputs into the tertiary sector are the outputs from the school sector. Wehope that several years down the road, the tertiary sector is able to reap the benefits from our reforms in thebasic education sector which we are now embarking on. But universities cannot simply wait. They have toensure that their current outputs, that is, their graduates and their research work, meet the aspirations of thecommunity. [TONE]∥[TONE]

power and therefore, no balance of power. Will this situation persist for a long time? Well, the answer to that depends on whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, and on the possibility of subsuming power politics within a constitutional world order shaped by the mono-cultural global ideology.

For the foreseeable future, though, a third world war seems unlikely; because there is no major ideological fracture severe enough to sustain it. War itself won't disappear, and occasional regional armed conflicts flare up.

Though a world war is less likely for the present, I worry about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and lethal bio-chemical arms. It is terrifying to see the way that power is increasingly disseminated to small, completely ruthless groups like terrorists, drug traffickers and local warlords. The great imponderable is that some nuts could create a nuclear explosion, or that some essentially local conflict could escalate out of control. The huge economic imbalance in the world will also result in serious disasters. The fact that the richest 20 percent have 86 percent of global GDP, and the 20 poorest countries only 1 percent constitutes a destabilizing factor that will harm world peace.

There are people who anticipate a more progressive path, sometimes called "the new medievalism", in which the relentless advance of information technology results in the demise of the state as we know it. The idea is that global communications will simultaneously empower individuals to create transnational virtual communities and make it more difficult for governments to control their populations. The result will be a new political landscape with overlapping jurisdictions in place of territorial states with distinct jurisdictions.

Again, I'm skeptical myself. We can't ultimately exist as virtual communities; we all have to live somewhere and pay our taxes. The resurgence of nationalism argues against this model in any case. In the first half of the 20th century many believed that nationalism would give way to a world organized on liberal principles; some even believed in world government. But today the pressure is in the opposite direction, towards ethnic separatism at an accelerating speed.

Since the end of the Cold War, much of the attention focused on nuclear and strategic issues has drained away to a dangerous extent in fact. Weapons of mass destruction have increased, and the international political and military balance has now been seriously undermined by the nuclear tests in countries and regions that have lost grip on them.

A stronger and more efficient United Nations that allows for diversified values, therefore, has been asked for to maintain a check-and-balance pattern of the world political structure.

As regards the balance of power in the future, well, the one thing that we can be sure about is that our job is not to predict the future but to improve the understanding of this diversified world we live in. On that front at least, we're optimistic about improvement and progress .

Delta

The large river best known to the ancient Greeks was the Nile of Egypt. They spoke of the river with admiration and called Egypt "the gift of the Nile". The mason for this was, first, that the Nile brought water to a rainless desert and, second, that once a year, the river overflowed its banks, leaving, as the water went back, a new layer of fertile soil.

The flood waters carry in them soil (called silt) from the upper parts of the river valley to the lower parts, and so to the sea. But as the river meets the sea, the sea acts as a barrier and forces the river to drop the silt it is carrying.

There are no tides in the Mediterranean to carry the silt away, so year after year it collects at the mouth of the Nile, and the river must find its way around islands of silt to the always more distant Mediterranean. In this way, a vast area of fertile soil has been built up at the mouth of the Nile and out into the sea. The river water splits up to form. small branches winding across the area. To the ancient Greeks, the mouth of the Nile looked like the drawing.

Now we sometimes name things after the letters of the alphabet they resemble: a U-turn, an 1-beam a T-square, an S-bend, and so on. The Greeks did the same. The triangular area of land built up at the mouth of the Nile looked like the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet delta (△) and so this was the name they gave it. The word is now used for all areas of land formed at the mouth of rivers which flow into tideless seas, even when they are nor triangular in shape. The Mississippi delta, for example, is not shaped at all like the Greek delta, as you will see if you look at a map.