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22) Claim: The best way to understand thecharacter of a society is to examine the character of the men and women thatthe society chooses as its heroes or its role models. Reason: Heroes and role models reveal asociety's highest ideals. Write a response in which you discuss theextent to which you agree or disagree with the claim and the reason on whichthat claim is based. =============================================================================== The main point of the issue is that whetheror not character of a society can be properly represented by the character ofits heroes and role models. I, according to the following discussion, hold theview that, though heroes reveal a society's highest ideals, we cannot try tounderstand character of a society simply by examining its heroes. On one hand,overly emphasizing on a particular individual can undoubtedly causes anincomplete understanding. On the other hand, it is apparently true that much ofthe character of a hero cannot accurately indicate a society as a whole. First of all, it is commonsense that wetend to use one or two words to primarily understand a character of a society,and correspondingly, if a hero of such society has the same character describedby that words, it should be a good choice to let the hero represent the wholesociety. However, character of a hero usually seems to be more impressive thanthat of a common citizen, so it would be possible that we may overestimate aparticular character of a society thanks to the impressive one of the hero. Theoverestimation may cause a misunderstanding of ones who did not know thesociety at first. Finally the disadvantages may cause more problems or evensome unnecessary conflicts. On the other point of view, some other alternativemethod such as observation and statistical analysis may be better ways to helpus to understand a particular society. Secondly, examining the heroes of a societycould not be a reliable way, though I concede that it is an effective way tomake a primary understanding of a society. Consequently, I deeply knowopponents abound, arguing that there should not be any measure more direct thanexamining the heroes. Although observation and scientific surveys may be sometimeslack of effectiveness, we nevertheless can never ignore the fact that thosescientific methods provide more reliable understanding of a particular society.Since simply knowing a society should not be our final goal, there must be somecooperation or competition with the mentioned society. Scientific methods giveus cogent information of the character of the society, making us confident inthe communications around the corner. Least but not the least, to further analysethe disadvantages of overestimating, let's set Yao, the famous basketballplayer, as an example. According to a recent survey conducted by 'New YorkTimes', among all the 1000 Chinese participants of the investigation, who wereasked that whether or not Yao is a hero of your country and that if he can actas a man who represent all the character of China, approximately 85 percent ofthe participants agree that Yao is a hero of China, and roughly 77 percent ofthe majority do not allow him as an exemplar of China. Further research showthat, generally speaking, the representatives of the survey do not think thatYao have all merits of Chinese, though they concede that Yao is impressive inhis humility and humor, which are exactly what Chinese proud of. In a nutshell, whether or not character ofa society can be properly represented by the character of its heroes and rolemodels is still a complex problem that any solution raised by individual isundoubtedly partial and incomplete. However, the analysis mentioned in thearticle still provides an alternative idea in solving the problem. |
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