临考抱佛脚，独立写作帖

besque

17号就考了，昨天才开始准备 用的是小范围机经
没时间也不管了 能写几篇是几篇吧。。。

besque

从昨天起完整写完的几篇发一下
请指点！


Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Professional athletes, such as football and basketball players, do not deserve the high salaries that they are paid.


Across the civilizations, there has never been a more widely understood, commonly accepted language than that of sports. Some argue that professional athletes are overpaid. I disagree with this statement. They are paid what they're worth for the following reasons.

First, professional athletes, equipped with skills and kinesthetic prowess, fulfill our natural desire for beauty and competition. High-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of a particular type of kinetic human beauty, which is related to not so much sex or cultural norms as human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body. In sports, we might seldom profess the love for grace or the body; more often than not, that love is cast and enacted in the symbology of competition: the grammar of elimination and advance, the signifier of hierarchy and rank, the vocabulary of technical analysis and statistics. And professional athletes, especially those at the top of their game, can express the unique and universal appeal of such beauty. The ticket to a Wimbledon match may have a price, but you can't really put a price tag on the experience of watching a tennis ball moving so fast it hisses and blurs. In light of this, I find it a bit funny that professional athletes are often accused of being overpaid, considering actors never face the same censure when both occupations make multi-billion dollar franchise in the entertainment industry and both involve mainly human presentation of skill and beauty, not to mention the fact that playing professional sports usually requires much harsher training.

That brings me to my second point: professional athletes undergo tremendous amount of training and enormous pressure throughout their career. The time and discipline required for serious training are the reason why top athletes are usually people who have devoted most of their conscious lives to the sports they play, starting, at the very latest, in their early teens. It was, for instance, at age thirteen that Roger Federer gave up soccer (and a recognizable childhood) and entered Switzerland's national tennis training center, where he spent most of his waking hours mastering his kinesthetic sense. For promising young athletes, refining this kind of acute kinesthetic sense is the primal goal of their daily practice regimens. The training is often repetitive and tedious, hitting thousands of strokes, doing countless Arab somersaults, day after day, to make tiny adjustments, and to develop the ability to do by "feeling" what cannot be done by conscious thought. After a certain point, it's more neurological than muscular. To an outsider, it might seem to teeter on the edge of cruelty, for there is no such thing as "perfection" to a truly outstanding athlete. Rewarding them for this level of dedication seems appropriate. Moreover, the industry consumes youth, and spits out washed up athletes mercilessly. Most professional athletes, such as swimmers runners and gymnasts, have extremely short careers filled with immense stress and intense criticism. This is based only on what we can observe from outside, as audience. A high salary and a fair share of the giant profits from the management and corporations seems a just reward.

In light of these, I believe it's only fair to pay professional athletes high salaries, as reward for the fantastic experience they provide us by displaying skills and grace that can only be achieved by years and years of harsh training and commitment. And it’s only reasonable to compensate them for the extreme stress they go through in a particularly cruel business.

besque

7. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Scientists should be responsible for the negative impacts of their discoveries.

Human beings are a protean and curious bunch, as hard to get any kind of univocal handle on as a scientific territory that has gone from naturalistic to cybernetic in less than eighty years. Scientists, equipped with intelligence and resources, are the pioneers exploring the unknown for us. At times, the discoveries of their researches can be misused and therefore cause problematic consequences. While some believe that scientist should be held responsible for the negative impacts of these discoveries, I personally disagree with this statement for reasons illustrated below.

It's shortsighted to blame scientists for the negative impacts of their discoveries, for they are not inventing the consequences of applying a discovery any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression. Nuclear weapons, just as any other technological appliance that has caused disastrous consequences, simply intensified the human tendencies and upped the stakes.  Intelligence and morality are different concepts, only when abused by the wrong people will intelligence become  a danger. Therefore, if we were to hold scientists culpable for the technologies employed by actual utilizers, instead of assessing the value of fundamental human natures, the same tragedies will only happen again and again.

Besides, were the scientists asked to be accountable for all the possible negative outcomes of their discoveries, it will hamper the progress of science and even our society. Just as a man with a torch has no idea what’s waiting for him in a dark cavern, scientists at the beginning of their researches do not know whether what they find will be desirable or not. For example, the pioneering American geneticist Craig Venter and his team of researchers have created the first synthetic life form, an achievement that, according to the scientists themselves, will herald the dawn of a new era in which new lives can be created to benefit humanity. The work is vastly condemned by many religious groups who claimed Venter was playing God. The result is controversial, but no one can deny that if the scientists were required to be responsible for every single negative result of their study, they wouldn’t have devoted into cutting-edge researches in the first place. Consequently, human society is to remain stagnant.

In conclusion, it is unfair and ridiculous to ask scientists alone answer for every negative result of their discoveries. If so, our society would simply stop progressing. While scientists themselves do have the obligations to remind people about negative consequences of their researches, we should put reasonable requirements and expectations on them, for there’s a fundamental difference between a humanity that is an aware and responsible civilization, compared with one where we are confined to condemning a minority of people who choose to dedicate their lives to exploring the unknown and unraveling the mysteries.

besque

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? The environmental issue is too complex to be handled by the individual.

It's too simple to just wring our hands and claim that the environmental issue is too complex to be handled by the individual. It would seem that way, at first glance, since it is indeed a global issue that respects no national boundaries and yet somehow seems at once imperative and ignored. Still, I disagree with the argument.

First, the power of the individual is not to be underestimated and overlooked. While some might argue internally critical politics of nations regarding environmental issue might be too intricate and difficult to be interfered, it's also undeniable that certain individuals, with connections that seem unreachable to the 99 percent, are in fact taking actions. I'm not so much referring to speeches given by Hollywood stars at the Academy Awards as concrete progress made by visionary entrepreneurs with technological resources and fiscal prowess. The extreme boom of renewable energy harvesting across the world from sources of solar-, wind- and hydroelectric have increased substantially. Take Elon Musk's project “Telsa Motors” for example. It started by focusing on the super-luxury market in order to develop credibility among the early affluent adopters, by which reputation it aims to eventually trick down with expenditures to provide a truly affordable electric car. It’s only a matter of time, with physicists and chemists working avidly to optimize battery charge distribution and investors gradually realizing the program’s value, before the infrastructure with advanced materials has the costs diminished, thus making it possible for a low or middle income person to purchase an electric car.

As for the rest of us, a question needs to be asked: Are we currently doing our utmost, as ordinary people, to be aware and responsible? More than anything I wish the answer to be yes, then again, the high-pitched incredulity of "What? You recycle?" has never failed to amaze me. It’s obvious that one cannot single-handedly slow down the deforestation rate of the Amazon Rainforest or lower the severity of global warming, nor is one asked or obligated to do those things—it’s the full capacity of individual effort that needs to be achieved. The news of Chinese air pollution and the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest has become a constant background noise that we either rant about on social networks or ignore altogether. It's ever so easy to blame the pollution and exploitation on big companies that produce corn syrup or mini vans, and over time these corporations seem to have become a kind of univalent emblem of evil at which we frown and sneer as we, in a practiced ennui, throw the beer bottle into the garbage can marked with "non-recyclable". As a matter of fact, the individual sense of responsibility is anything but complex; it does not require heavy investment or elaborate business tactics. And yet, undoubtedly, we are failing at what Henry James had wanted for his readers almost a hundred years ago—“being finely aware so as to be richly responsible”. We might never know how much difference we can make, collectively, by administering the easiest, most mundane measures in daily life, because the majority of “the individual” don’t bother to contribute. So, how can we claim that the issue is too complex to handle, when most of us aren’t even handling it?

In light of these, I would have to disagree with the statement that the environmental issue is too complex for the individual to handle. The future of our environment appears bleaker than it needs to, for the effort of certain individuals, albeit strenuous, is not to be neglected. Also, we shouldn't complain about the weight and complexity of a problem, when most of us refuse to take basic measures to alleviate it. There is a fundamental difference between a humanity that is aware and responsible civilization, compared with the one where possibilities are diminished by the narrowness of vision.