Vocabulary: Competitions 詞匯: 比賽，競爭

I'm sometimes told you have to make your own luck. If you don't try something, how can you succeed? This is very true for competitions - if you want a chance of winning something you have to take part. In other words, you have to be in it to win it!

There are people who regularly take part in all sorts of competitions with great enthusiasm. These people are nicknamed 'compers'. They use every spare minute writing slogans and captions, answering questions and completing crosswords. You could almost say it's like an addiction.

The motivation for being a 'comper' is obvious: it's about being a winner and being rewarded with a prize. These can be small or large: from a box of chocolates to a new car, a trip of a lifetime around the world, or even a new house. Isn't that worth competing for? Unfortunately, I haven't won any of those things. But, to be honest, I don't enter many competitions.

Of course competitions that offer money prizes attract entries from millions of people, making the odds of winning very unlikely. But one man who has been lucky is a retired lecturer from the UK called Martin Dove. He is a serial 'comper' and has managed to bag prizes such a yacht and a race horse.

Martin says: "I've been a comper for 40 years. It's like admitting some addiction, isn't it really?" He gets respect from other compers and also admits:"Some people have called me the Master of Comping, the King of Comping, the Guru of Comping. But it's just a word, just a phrase. It's just I was fairly high-profile."

If scanning the supermarket shelves for cereal boxes and crisp packets for your next big win sounds too much like hard work, you can always try the lottery. This is a game where people buy a lottery ticket hoping that the numbers on their ticket are chosen in a draw so that they win a big money prize. Some people dream about being a millionaire and hope this type of game will make that dream real.

For many, winning remains a dream, but they continue to try their luck as there's always a small chance they might succeed. But what if you do win? Then you have to ask: how am I going to spend all that money? Some people say that 'money can't buy you happiness'. What do you think?