issue170 欢迎大家来拍，第一次发帖不懂规矩，请大家指教

cstanleyUID: 2755104

刚开始写，语言还不是很好，希望大家多拍砖，或者给一些方向性的建议，谢谢啦

170"The surest indicator of a great nation is not the achievements of its rulers, artists, or scientists, but the general welfare of all its people."

Welfare is one of the indexs which indicates the development of a country's economy, culture, education, politics and so forth. While the speaker asserts that the surest indicator of a great nation should be the general welfare of all its people instead of the achievements of its rulers, artists, or scientists, which obviously neglect two points: for one thing ,there is a inner relationships between welfare and the achievements of different realm; for another, they narrowly understand the meaning of greatness

Admittedly, high welfare seems more direct for people who are no matter the civilians of the nation or from other countries to cognize the greatness of the nation. Take a look at those developed countries in the world. Most of them have a high level of welfare so that it can guarantee civilians basic need of living . As a result, people like the speaker tend to regard the welfare index as the surest standard to evaluate the development and greatness of a nation.

Nonetheless, in my view, they all miss one point that high level of welfare also connects to prosperity of economy, advanced science and technology, profound art and literature and so forth.  Without abundant financial support, how can a nation provide enough welfare to its people? Without advanced technology, what can a nation depend on to improve their efficiency of industry and agriculture to propel the economy to go ahead? Without a great political system, how can a nation keep active and steady? All these advancement call for the efforts from rulers, engineers scientists and so on. However, the inner relationship among all these realms is always overlooked, which causes people in the developing countries complain about their insufficient social welfare without confessing their underdevelopment and not dedicate themselves to building their own country, which in turn impedes the nation's improvement and goes into a vicious circle.

Another point people usually neglect is that there also exists other indexes which can equally indicate the greatness of a country as welfare does depending on the definition of greatness. This point can be regarded as the amplification of the former one. Take China as an example. Although the welfare of the nation is poor, it can also be called great on some other realms. China inherits his culture which has developed for nearly five thousand years and provide the world with a number of cultural production such as kung fu, Chinese dishes, Peking Opera and so forth. If we define greatness as the profound of culture, can you deny that China is also a great country in the world?

All in all, while I concede that welfare is a good indicator of a great nation for the reason that it helps people who are poverty and disable to feed on themselves, I can't accent to the speaker's idea to set welfare as the surest indicator because there exists inner relationship between achievements of a nation's rulers, artists, or scientists and welfare and whether a nation is great or not is determined by the standard you choose to evaluate it.