GMAT ISSUE类作文范文-96

Topic:

In order to understand a society, we must examine the contents of its museums and the subjects of its memorials. What a society chooses to preserve, display and commemorate is the truest indicator of what the society values.

Instructions:

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your views with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations or reading.

Sample Essay

The speaker alleges that understanding a society requires examining its memorials and museums, since their subject matter and contents are the truest indicators of what a society values. I agree that we can learn a great deal about a society through its museums and memorials. However, these may not be the “truest” indicators of social values. To discover other values that shape a society, we also need to examine it popular forms of expression.

Museums and memorials offer important evidence of what a society holds dear. For instance, early war memorials symbolize abstract virtues such as courage and honor, as well as combat victory. Later memorials honoring the fallen in Vietnam tend to emphasize individual sacrifice that will present its history in ways that underscore its hardships, achievements and ideals. When museums present evidence of a social failing, such as racism, the intent is to stress a cherished ideal, such as equality, that has been violated.

However, museums and memorials reflect a society’s official values, not necessarily its most pervasive or influential ones. To discover the common values that significantly affect daily life, we must explore a society’s popular media, its forms of entertainment and its advertising. From the media we learn about people’s interests and viewpoints. Looking at popular entertainment tells us whether people enjoy representations of sex and violence, or stories of courage and valor. And advertising appeals to basic material values; it shows us what individuals are willing to buy, and why. In examining these popular forms of expression, we can see that the everyday preferences and values that shape a society are frequently at odds with its official ideals.

In conclusion, to develop a complete picture of what a society is like, we need to understand its officially sanctioned values as well as its popular ones. For this reason, it is important to examine popular forms of expression, as well as the content of a society’s museums or the subjects of its memorials.

 

GMAT ISSUE类作文范文-97

Topic:

In business, more than in any other social arena, men and women have learned how to share power effectively.

Instructions:

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your views with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations or reading.

Sample Essay

The stated opinion is vague, with no clear meaning for “sharing power effectively.” But if this phrase is intended to convey the idea that roughly equal numbers of men and women occupy prestige and high-paying positions in business, then I believe the claim at issue is mistaken for two reasons.

First of all, it is not the case that women are demonstrably more successful at attaining powerful positions in business than in other social arenas. Admittedly, the percentage of women earning degrees and entering the business world is significantly greater than in other prestigious professions such as medicine, engineering or science. However, the ratio of women in graduate business programs and in business management positions is about the same as in law schools and firms, or in Ph.D. programs and in teaching positions in higher education. In business, law and higher education, the proportion of professional women is around 40 percent.

Secondly, very few women achieve the highest-level positions in business. Recent studies indicate that women occupy just under 3 percent of corporate executive positions from the vice president level on up. And more importantly, this percentage has not changed significantly during the past ten or fifteen years, a period during which the number of women in management careers in record numbers, they are setting into lower level jobs while their male counterparts are achieving the more powerful ones.

There is considerable controversy about the reasons why women tend to crowd around the bottom of the business career ladder. Some blame the proverbial glass ceiling, said to be held firmly in place by an “old boy network.” Others claim that women are naturally held back as they struggle to fulfill the dual roes of professional and family caregiver. In any case, women are not any more successful in achieving powerful positions in business than in some other high prestige careers; and they do not share power effectively with men and within the business world itself.

 

GMAT ISSUE类作文范文-98

Topic:

In order to accommodate the increasing number of undergraduate students, colleges and universities should offer most courses through distance learning, such as videotapes instruction that can be accessed through the internet or cable television. Requiring students to appear at a designated time and place is no longer an effective or efficient way of teaching most undergraduate courses.

Instructions:

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your views with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations or reading.

Sample Essay

In response to the challenge of providing education for an expanding undergraduate population, one tempting solution is to replace university teachers and classrooms with distance learning technologies like the Internet or cable television. However, I believe that these technologies are best suited as valuable support resources, not as replacements for the traditional face-to-face classroom experience.

Admittedly, the Internet or cable television may be more cost-effective than traditional classrooms as means for quickly transmitting information to a large number of students. And, computer-generated standardized tests are a cheap way to assess information acquisition. However, there is much more to teaching than conveying information. Likewise, there is more to learning than a demonstrated ability to pass standardized tests.

Teaching just begins with the delivery of information. After that, teaching involves the complex and often spontaneous process of dialogical reasoning about the information at hand. This process includes clarifying, analyzing, evaluating, criticizing and synthesizing information and points of view, as well as creatively and logically exploring alternatives, solutions and new design possibilities. Done well, teaching further provides effective models of rationality and moral responsibility. It is difficult to see how flat technology can replace the human element in these essential aspects of the teaching craft.

In the same way, absorbing information is just the starting point of learning. To learn is also to develop habits of careful, critical and creative thinking about information and to acquire a hunger for learning more. Moreover, learning is fundamental to a person’s emerging rational autonomy and sense of moral responsibility to others. These dispositional aspects of learning are difficult to foster in technical packages or to assess; nonetheless they are at the heart of what learning is supposed to produce: educated persons.

In conclusion, I believe that distance learning technologies are best used as efficient supplements to teaching and learning. We cannot think that technology will make a good substitute for the classroom without relying on the unlikely assumption that students are effective autodidacts , and can develop educated dispositions and habits of mind in the absence of teachers and mentors. This assumption, I fear, would effectively reduce education to unreflective training.

 

GMAT ISSUE类作文范文-99

Topic:

If a nation is to ensure its own economic success, it must maintain a highly competitive educational system in which students compete among themselves and against students from other countries.

Instructions:

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your views with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations or reading.

Sample Essay

I don’t think it is a good idea to design an educational system that focuses mainly on competition. For although a little competition might produce desired results, in the long run too much competition will be destructive. Instead, I believe that our national economic success will be better promoted by an education system that encourages cooperative learning among students, and with students from other countries.

Granted, competitiveness is an important aspect of human nature. And, properly directed, it can motivate us to reach higher and produce more, not to mention meet deadlines. But being competitive fixes our focus externally, on marking and beating the progress of others with whom we compete. Such external motivation can direct our attention away from creative solutions to our problems, and away from important human values like cooperation and fair play. Indeed, a highly competitive environment can foster cheating and ruthless back-stabbing within an organization, and ill will and mistrust among nations. In the extreme case, competition between nations becomes war.

On the other hand, an environment of cooperation encourages us to discover our common goals and the best ways to achieve them. At the national and international levels, our main interests are in economic well-being and peace. In fact, economic success means little without the security of peace. Thus, global peace becomes a powerful incentive for developing educational models of cooperative learning ,and implementing exchange programs and shared research projects among universities from different countries.

Moreover, research suggests that cooperative settings foster greater creativity and productivity than competitive ones. This has been shown to be the case both in institutions of higher learning and in business organizations. If true, it seems reasonable to argue that national economic success would be similarly tied to cooperative rather than competitive effort.

In conclusion, competition can provide an effective stimulus to achievement and reward. Even so, I believe it would be unwise to make competition the centerpiece of our encouraging cooperative learning.

 

GMAT ISSUE类作文范文-100

Topic:

In order to force companies to improve policies and practices considered unethical or harmful, society should rely primarily on consumer action - such as refusal to buy products - rather than legislative action.

Instructions:

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your views with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations or reading.

Sample Essay

Consumer action is an important tool for responding to harmful or unethical business practices. However, it is not always an especially effective one. Thus I disagree with the stated opinion, and would argue that legislative action is an equally important means for constraining the activities of business.

Ideally, consumer action would be the best free-marker response to harmful or unethical business activity, Consider widespread public support for the United Farm Worker’s table grape boycott, call by late union leader Cesar Chavez in protest of injustices against filed workers. The boycott worked; eventually loss of what Adam Smith had in mind when he argued that business, left free to produce the greatest social benefit.

However ,history has shown the hand of competition sometimes to be inept as well as invisible in guiding the modern corporation. Limited solely by the forces of competition, corporations have been known to steal from one another, exploit workers, inflate prices, market harmful products, lie in advertising and pollute the environment. More over, consumer response has had little if any effect on many such practices.

Indeed, it is increasingly difficult to direct an effective consumer response. In a time of large conglomerates and multi-tiered international corporations, consumers may not know which company is responsible for a given harm or injustice. Additionally, those harmed by a business may not be its consumers. For instance, if a clothing chain subcontracts to foreign garment companies that seriously exploit their workers, few of the store’s customers would stop shopping there out of sympathy for faceless workers thousands of miles away. Finally, consumer action takes time; it took years for the UFW boycott to succeed. Sometimes the harm in question is simply too great to wait for the invisible hand.

In conclusion, consumer action should not be the primary means of reacting to undesirable business practices. Some legislation is necessary to curb business activities that create serious harm or injustice.

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