Speech by Bill Gates

Remarks of Bill Gates, Harvard Commencement 2007

Text type: SPEECH
Thursday, June 7, 2007, http://www.cnbc.com

Bill Gates

Part One: Vocabulary matching
(Text as prepared for delivery)

President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates:

I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.”

I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year … and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.

I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimson has called me “Harvard’s most successful dropout.” I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class … I did the best of everyone who failed.

But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today.

Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’t even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn’t worry about getting up in the morning. That’s how I came to be the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people.

Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn’t guarantee success.

One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world’s first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.

I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: “We’re not quite ready, come see us in a month,” which was a good thing, because we hadn’t written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.

What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege – and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on.

But taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.

I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.

But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.

It took me decades to find out.

Match the sentences below with the correct word in bold in the passage.


Write your answer on the lines provided.

1. Something that gives pride or pleasure . ___________

2. To be in or continue after a pause or intermission. ___________

3. A short account of your education and work experience, often used when you are applying for a new job. ______________

4. Deserving to be praised or accepted. ____________

5. To clap your hands in order to show that you line something. _________

6.To find out where you are, to be familiar with a place. _________

7. Unusual because it is so good or so great. ___________

8. To overcome difficulties or obstacles. _____________

9. To make us feel very happy or excited. ____________

10. To frighten somebody in order to make a person do something. ________

11. To change completely. _________
12. Shocking or terrible. _________________

13. Feeling desperate. _________

14. Reveal, made known to all ______________

15. Terrible and very poor condition. ____________

16. The student usually with the highest rank in class who delivers the address in commencing exercises . _______________

Part Two: Grammar

For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we 1. ________(be).

During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who 2. _________(be) dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I 3. __________(be+never+see)or even 4. ________(hear) of, rotavirus, 5. _______(be+kill) half a million kids each year – none of them in the United States.

We were shocked. We 6. ________(be+just+assume) that if millions of children 7. _________(die) and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered.

If you believe that every life 8. _______(be) equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it 9. _______(deserve) to be the priority of our giving.”

So we 10. ______(begin) our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: “How 11. _________(be) the world let these children die?”

The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.

But you and I have both.

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, 12. _______(serve) people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.

If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world.

This task is open-ended. It can never be 13. _______(finish). But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.

I 14. _________(be) optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: “Inequity 15. ________(be+ been) with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end – because people just … don’t … care.”

I completely disagree.

I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.

Part Three: Further Vocabulary related to Helping The Poor

Circle the correct word.

All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human 1. ( suffering/tragedies/evils) that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – not because we didn’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have 2. ( danced/ fled/acted).

The 3. ( journey/problems/barrier) to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.

To turn caring into 4. ( presentations/action/words), we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.

Even with the 5. (advent/invention/instruction) of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.

But if the officials were 6. ( crudely/ bluntly/brutally) honest, they would say: “Of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them were on this plane. We’re determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took the 7. (ideas/ lives/ fate) of the one half of one percent.”

The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of 8. (stoppable/ laudable/preventable) deaths.

We don’t read much about these deaths. The media covers what’s new – and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it’s easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it’s difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It’s hard to look at suffering if the situation is so 9. ( simple/ worldly/complex) that we don’t know how to help. And so we look away.

If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.

Finding solutions is 10. (simple/ conclusive/essential) if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks “How can I help?,” then we can get action – and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares — and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.

ANSWERS


Part One: 1. timely honour 2. resume 3. applaud 4. orientation 5. graduation 6. phenomenal 7. odds 8. credit 9. exhilarating 10. intimidating 11. transformed 12. appalling 13. despair 14. exposure 15. unspeakable 16. valedictorian.


Part Two: 1. have 2. were 3. had never seen 4. heard 5. was killing 6. had just assumed 7. were dying 8. has 9. deserves 10. began 11. could 12. serving 13. finished 14. am 15. has been


Part Three: 1. tragedies 2. acted 3. barrier 4. action 5. advent 6. brutally 7. lives 8. preventable 9. complex 10. essential