TOEFL Model Essay
Posted on :
16-12-2008
- Author :
P Sai Baba
Essay-A: It is good to look ahead, but unwise to try to look further than one can see. As such, just eight years into this century, it might be rash to say what changes the rest of the 92 years will bring. George Orwell seemed wrong in believing that when one thought of the future one should think of a boot stamping on a human face. But there are already indications of quite a few hobnailed boots stamping on at least one human face.
The fact is that we live in an age obsessed by our anxieties and, therefore, by fear of the future. If today is bad, tomorrow may be worse, we tell ourselves. Such anxieties are particularly to be found in societies at once learned and ignorant. However, the present is where we have to live. The scrutiny of the future is a fact of today, and its most accepted mode is scientific.
Peter F. Drucker, in his book "The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society", expects the unexpected to happen, arguing that the future will not merely alter present trends but also be "discontinuous" with the immediate past. But, then, hope always survives in the human breast. That may well be because most of "modern" technology is not very new. Industrial chemistry, electricity and electronics, the triumph of the internal combustion engine in aircraft and cars, and so on, have all proceeded much as might have been expected.
Of course, there are some new things, but none of them has been beyond educated guessing, except in their all-important details. Antibiotics began with Ehrlich. Synthetic fibers and materials have a long history. Computers really are new, but they are exceptional. Space travel, however, depends entirely on huge, conceptually simple Newtonian engines.
The central point of the whole debate is that the 21st century will be surprising, even though it is already clear that its emperor will be knowledge: science and technology, fact and theory, know-how in management and marketing, and instant access to data. Mankind, therefore, expects the Emperor to deliver it from many of its evils. (500 words)
Essay-B:
All that needs to be done if this century is to spell beneficent changes is that political leaders should change their own outlook, as also that of their people, which proved disastrous in the 20th century. Some reforms were introduced; occasional squalls ruffled the national calm and determination to forge ahead; stolid aspirants climbed the ladder of political office, and life jogged along not very comfortably except for a few persons.
To put it with brutal frankness, in the 20th century the world increasingly seemed to have become a Luddite’s paradise, devoted to the preservation of the status quo. New money, the rising professional class, climbing individualism and its greed smashed the long-settled sense of community, the human community. Middle class conventions ruled. The gentleman, the helpless good man brought up on traditional virtues and obstinacies, found himself pushed aside. His decent grousing became sanctity and its own melancholy reward.
It is perfectly possible that, just eight years into the 21st century, mankind is already undergoing one of those great revolutions of sensibility that are labeled after the event as Renaissance, Reformation or Romanticism. One can indeed speculate on a clash occupying the rest of this century between new and refurbished sensibilities, ideologies and expectations, on the one hand, and the new resources of policies and administration in a world where mechanical memory and bureaucracy, not to say politics, do not wane.
In sum, playing the future is an unavoidable and important game because our hopes as well as our fears are bound up with the fact that it will be discontinuous with the present. Perhaps the best hope for mankind lies in the sheer inventiveness, unexpectedness and resistance of the individual human to the terrors of existence.
Finally, the average person has already been through a revolution that was not publicized, even if it was perceived, a revolution of rising expectations. It is, therefore, doubtful if he will let anyone con him into the counter-revolution of falling expectations. (470 words)
The world can hope for many beneficent changes, not a little because of the type of people inhabiting it. Agreed that, landed with a population running into billions, whatever progress it achieves in the present century must necessarily seem inadequate to meet the needs of the people. But the world already seems to be on the right track. The rate of illiteracy, according to a survey conducted by the UNICEF in 2001, has already come down to 17 percent, and attempts are on to reduce the rate of population growth. It speaks for itself that, notwithstanding the deplorable 9/11 outrage, not all countries found themselves in economic doldrums.
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