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有人觉得回忆过去对现在生活没有意义?
Learning about the past has no value for those of us living in the present.
Do you agree or disagree? Use specific reasons and examples to support your
answer.
[托福参考范文]
I disagree wholeheartedly that learning about the past has no value for
those of us living in the present. In fact, the definition of learning includes
the idea of an accumulation of experiences from the past. Learning can only take
place if we make an association between things that have happened in the past or
between something in the past and something that we predict will happen in the
future. All knowledge that we acquire as we grow is from the past-language,
customs, academic subjects, and so on. While it may be helpful sometimes to be
able to overlook previous knowledge in order to avoid the constraint conformity,
the vast majority of knowledge that we learn is a huge boost-imagine if each of
us had to discover by ourselves that 2 + 2 = 4! So, in a very real sense, all
learning depends on past events.
We are only able to live in this world with our current standard of living
because we have learned from the past. We receive knowledge from the past and we
are able to use it and improve it. We examine our actions in the past and we
make judgments about what was right and what was wrong. Then, it is hoped, we
will attempt to avoid those same mistakes again. For example, one of the great
mistakes all over the world has been depriving women and the disempowered
classes status in society and many industrialized and developing countries all
over the world are attempting to avoid such mistakes both in the present and in
the future.
Furthermore, all of the knowledge that we have today is a result of all the
work of our predecessors. The ancient Greeks developed geometry, which helped
other European scientists analyze the solar system, which in turn gave us a new
understanding of our place in the universe.
The great majority of technology today depends directly on several
thousands of years of work of past thinkers. To ignore the knowledge of the past
would be to throw away five thousand years of history and experience.
There is, however, some seemingly small, but important value to ignoring
the past. It is often the case that history or tradition has the effect of
constraining our thought in the present and many important philosophical and
scientific breakthroughs have only been possible as a direct result of ignoring
the past. The past, in a sense, can blind us to the truth, we can become bound
by tradition. For example, at one time, leading thinkers in Europe thought that
the Earth was at the center of the universe and those who disagreed were
persecuted as heretics, even Copernicus, who we now know was correct about his
heliocentric model of the Solar System. However, scientists were eventually able
to break from the past and accept the new model of the universe.
In short, learning from and analyzing the past has enormous value for us
and life as we know it on Earth today would not be possible without the benefit
of thousands of years of history and accumulated knowledge. It is important,
however, to ignore the past so that we can make a step forward, and such free
thinking should be encouraged, although not at the expense of past knowledge.
Learning from the past is something like learning from our parents-in most
cases, their past helps us have a better future, but there are times when we
need to make a break from the past and make a bold step into an unknown
future.
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发表于 2016-7-10 15:24:49