李笑来185篇博士英语范文（66页）

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2. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Parents are the best teachers. Use specific reasons
and examples to support your answer.
Obviously, the earliest teachers we have in our lives in most cases are our parents, and they are generally the
most involved in the development and education of their children. Yet neither are all parents good teachers
nor are those good parents the best teachers.
First of all, not all parents are good teachers. As normal individuals, some parents more or less have bad
habits. Even though parents almost instinctively devote themselves to cultivating their offspring, the outcome
might turn out to be disappointment, for all children tend to unconsciously or subconsciously copy every thing
from their parents. Another deficiency of parents as teachers is the fact that most parents are lack of common
senses of education. All too often we observe some parents tend to pursue their cherished but failed dream by
forcing their children to develop in a prearranged direction. Ironically, if their children did not follow the
instructions, the children would be regarded as disobedient or allegedly rebellious. In fact, it is parents rather
than their children that virtually disobey common senses.
Moreover, some parents are qualified as good teachers, but not all of them are the best ones. When children
are in the preliminary school, it is not surprising that parents are capable of teaching their children almost
every subject even better than professional teachers in the school. But the situation will not last long. We live
in a world where knowledge is accumulated by multiplying and at the same time becomes more and more
specialized. Therefore, to be a professional in a certain field today takes much longer time than ever before.
No parent is able to be professional in all fields, though they might be experts in one or more fields. Wise
parents often release rather than charge their children as early as possible. They are aware of the possibility
outside the family.
Parents may, nevertheless, help their children much more than do good teachers. Most parts of children
education are virtually beyond teachers' reaches. It is parents that supplement. Psychology studies have
shown us that parents' love sometimes has astonishingly magic power to their children. Albert Einstein's
mother and Forest Gump's mother are both good examples. On the other hand, parents might do their
children harm more than do bad teachers as well. The natures of those children whose parents have divorced
are often severely distorted. In a word, it is rather superficial to simply say that parents are the best teachers.
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4. It has been said, "Not everything that is learned is contained in books." Compare and contrast knowledge
gained from experience with knowledge gained from books. In your opinion, which source is more important?
Why?
Both experiences and books are very essential resources, and both of them have relevant merits.
Experiences are the most direct resources we ever have. Almost our every basic skill came from experiences,
such as walking, articulating, reading even thinking. Without experiences, some natural born abilities even
might lose. Studies have shown that a baby who was robbed by animals into forest for 12 years lost his ability
to talk in human language. Furthermore, it is generally accepted that each and every skill develops by
experiences, and that's why people always say practice makes perfect.
Books are valuable when knowledge is beyond the scope of our experiences. Perhaps the most obvious
examples are those fluent writers. They write various stories, the scopes of which are far beyond any
individual's experiences. Take Joyce Carol Oates for example, her productivity has been prodigious,
accumulating in less than two decades to nearly thirty titles, including novels, collections of short stories and
verse, plays and literary criticism. Although some of them appear to come from her own direct observations,
her dreams, and her fears, much more is clearly from the experiences of others. Her fictive world remains
strikingly akin to that real one reflected in the daily newspapers, the television news and talk shows, and the
popular magazines of our day.
Yet either experiences or books may give us wrong information. Our direct observations always are subject to
our beliefs, hopes, fears, expectations, and our bias, which might make observations unreliable. People vary in
their powers of observation, and the reliability of our observations is no better than the reliability of our
memories, which as we know can be deceptive. Information printed in papers sometimes is unreliable either,
it may be misprinted, or even deliberately distorted. For example, Definitions such as Marxism, Capitalism,
Zionism are totally different in the Oxford Learner's Dictionary of Current English between the original
edition and the sanctioned Russian edition.