Some people think that automobile has improved modern life. Others think that automobile has caused serious problems. What is your opinion? Use specific reasons and examples to support your idea.
Although automobiles have changed our modern lives in some ways with its speed, convenience, and capacity of carrying things, it also brings with itself many undesirable consequence, including congestion, air pollution and accidents.
With the constant and uprising numbers of population around the world, the needs of transportation keep rising. Therefore, more and more vehicles are put into use nowadays. There are not enough roads and highways for all at the same time. Just take one simple example to make it clearer. Just image that masses of vehicles enter and leaves the cities at rush hours. It will become a mess and take a long time to get out of that stuck.
Air pollution is another issue caused by automobile. The widespread use of automobile commonly exhausts a large amount of smoke emission into the air. The dirty air harms people health badly. It causes variety of diseases such as mental disability, insomnia, and even cancer if you breath too much polluted air. In addition, it is destroying the ozone layers that protect the earth from the hurt of direct and strong ultraviolet rays. It makes the weather become warmer and warmer. If the situation keeps going this way, the icebergs in two poles will be melted, which leads to the sea level rising and flooding all over the world.
Last but not least, one more important matter is that driving automobiles has lead to many accidents. Sometimes, when you have to drive although you are too tired or sleepy, or even drunk, you could not concentrate on driving and it will cause serious accidents. But you still can have accidents when you drive carefully. Not only you driving in an entire street, there are, of course, a lot of drivers on that way, too. Other careless drivers can still crash into your cars unexpectedly.
To sum up, we cannot deny the fact that the automobile has improved our modern life in many ways. It is now a vital role of our social lives. But the problems caused by automobile seem to be too dangerous and have too many bad effects on our health. Therefore, it is now the time for us to have an overall look at these problems and find the way to solve by supporting people using public transportation or researching for the alternative fuel which does not pollute the air.
TOEFL listening lectures: A lecture in biology class