Topic: The study of history has value only to the extent that it is relevant to our daily lives. Do you agree or not?
In my opinion, history has its unique status along the rough road of pursuing knowledge and truth, as well as in the great hall of human civilization. The value of studying history is much beyond the part which is relevant to our daily lives only. The shallow statement in the title has greatly underestimated the miscellaneous and precious merits of history.
To begin with, history can provide people with the inspirations and orientations as regard to what kind of future we are going to achieve. By learning about the history of its own social development and others’, every country in this planet will have a clear position to survive and develop themselves among totally more than two hundred countries. For instance, China has been through primitive society, feudal society, semi-feudal and semi-colonial society, and industrial society all along the five thousand years. Thanks to the hard work of archeologists and other relevant experts, we Chinese people are well aware that we are now struggling for further development in the socialist society in order to realize our dream of stepping into communist society. As to an individual, history also services an indispensable function to determine one’s career, one’s future. That students are obligated to learn the history courses, has been a widely accepted educational phenomenon. Some will draw the inspirations out of the history stories and folklores, while some develop their specific interests in archeology, geography, astronomy or literature, and then probably they may decide to engage in one of these realms.
What’s more, we can learn a lot from the significant successes and terrible failures in the historical river. It is undeniable that the history has witnessed the achievement in food productivity, health insurance, information sharing and global trade. On the other hand, the history also has experienced the two world wars breaking out, the Berlin Walls standing up, holocaust happening in Nanjing China and race discrimination prevailing in the USA. Facing so many historical events, we must draw lessons from the past, and do our best in the present in order to make our future more beautiful and hopeful. As we can get known from the media, books and the Internet, there are a lot of suffering, disturbances and quarrels concerning safety, peace, customs, values and other perspectives still existing in this world. The history is one of the important sources where we can turn to ask for help and may find some efficient and irrational solutions for the extant problems.
To sum up, I absolutely don’t agree with the statement, since it may mislead people to neglect the importance of studying history while we are and will always be in need of the historical knowledge and experiences and many other aspects, some of which may still be unknown or obscure to us now. ‘The history has made who we are now’, as I quote here, ‘while we are making the history for our own.’ In short, the history is affecting almost every field, every single person, as well as the whole human society. Its value and importance is very much profound and significant, more than we can image.
Another one hour
Amount of words: 545
Any suggestion will be appreciated.
Andy
TOEFL listening discussions: A conversation between a student and an HR interviewer
