来源:环球教育整理
小编:环球教育整理 197 2017年2月18日托福写作解析
1.Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? We should state our honest opinions even though other people may disagree with them.
Nowadays, most projects at school or in workplaces are completed by group work. When we work as members in a team, it is common that everyone in this team needs to present his or her opinions. Some people believe that it is better not to state our honest opinions sometimes so that out team members will not consider us as aggressive. However, to my understanding, always stating our honest opinions could benefit our teamwork in different ways.
For students, making our ideas known to classmates or group members is one of the most important steps when doing an assignment. It is true that the majority of our team members might hold different opinions from us. However, there is no guarantee that the majority is always correct about everything. It happens that the minority’s opinions are more advisable than what most people believe. Moreover, if everyone has the opportunity to state their honest opinion, the team could create an atmosphere that all team members could feel free to express their ideas, which will simulate the students’ critical thinking ability. When one student expresses his or her opinion that is different from others’, all group members will discuss about it together, thus to analyze whether it is correct or not, providing evidence to support their standpoints. This process of discussion will definitely lead to critical thinking. Therefore, I believe that students should state their honest opinions even when their classmates disagree with them.
In workplaces, many people refuse to state their opinion honestly in order not to offend their colleagues and supervisors. As far as I am concerned, if we express our opinions in appropriate and polite ways, others will not feel uncomfortable even if they disagree with us. On the contrary, our co-workers and supervisors will tend to consider us as honest person, and thus will be more willing to cooperate with us.
Admittedly, in certain cultures, it is impolite to always express opinions in a straightforward and honest way. Based on what I have learned about Japanese culture, the local people will keep silent and avoid stating honest opinion if they believe that others hold the opposite opinion. If someone speaks up in this situation, he or she will be perceived as a person who “does not read the atmosphere”, which means that the speaker fails to taking others’ feelings into consideration.
Although people from different cultures have different conventions in terms of how to express ideas different from others, I still prefer to make our voices be heard. This is because that our society is advancing when everyone feels free to discuss and interact with each other. Only in this way our discussions and daily work could elicit innovative ideas, which might be different from what the majority believes.
2.Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Technology designed to make our life simpler actually makes our life more complicated.
It cannot be denied that technology enables people to live a better and more convenient life today. People have been enjoying high-tech products such as smart phones, car navigation system, and laptops, to name a few. However, it does not mean that those high-tech tools make our life easier now than in the past. In fact, technology makes our life far more complicated today as illustrated in the following parts.
High-tech tools can save lots of labor work, but sometimes they are not as “smart” as we expect. I would like to use car navigation system as an example. In the past, people could only refer to printed maps to find ways to their destinations. Nowadays, car navigation system can automatically find the right path for us. It seems that car navigation system is far more convenient than printed maps. However, in order to install the system, we need to download the digital maps before ahead and make sure that our destinations are recognizable. If the system fails to recognize the destination, it sometimes does not stop navigating, but lead us to somewhere else. Once I was driving from California to a Native American Reservation in Arizona, the car navigation failed to find the right path and led me to a small town that I had never heard of. Fortunately, I found a gas station and the employees there showed me the correct way. My own experience shows that high-tech products might not be always as reliable as we expect.
Another example of how technology has made our life more complicated is online shopping. Nowadays, more and more people choose to shop clothes online, so to save time and efforts. Admittedly, shopping online is convenient to some extent compared with going to a shopping mall, because we could stay at home and check out with several clicks. All we need to do then is to wait until our new clothes are delivered to us. However, many people had terrible shopping experience in that the colors and designs of those clothes are not exactly the same as they are described online. Moreover, the size might not fit us, which is not expected either. In this case, we need to follow a complicated returning process, completing forms needed for returning and going to the local express service to send the clothes back. The process of returning is extremely daunting, which usually takes a long time for us to get our money back.
Based on the above discussion, it could be concluded that sometimes technology is not as convenient as we expect. Should we just refuse to use high-tech products? I do not think so. I believe that modern technology is still developing, and it will definitely make our life more and more comfortable and convenient in the future.
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