欢迎拍 issue 37

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TOPIC: ISSUE37 - "In most societies, competition generally has more of a negative than a positive effect."
WORDS: 582          TIME: 00:45:00          DATE: 2010-7-28 10:50:52


Would competition bring more negative rather than positive influence to us as the speaker claims? I concede that undue competition will inevitably be counterproductive to our society. However, in most case, competition is the very foundation upon which we human advances.

To begin with, few people would deny the benefits brought by competition. In the Olympic Games, athletes pursue the notion of “higher, quicker and stronger ". Outstanding skills from sportsmen can be much more frequently seen in fierce rival. Understandably, it is easy to image that how boring a match will be if two team have no desire for victory, that is to say, have no awareness of competitive. It would be a disaster if sports become a show rather than a competition. Sportsmen are satisfied with their current condition and do not spend much time on training. As a result, there won't be any engaging and exciting matches any more. Fortunately, this day has no came yet and we can appreciate exciting sports match. In short, only thorough competition can sports guarantee us better enjoyment of athlete. When it comes to area of business, we also gain lots of benefit from the wars between different companies. They compete each other in all aspects, such as technologies, price and so forth. It is a pleasure to see that the quality of products or services improve while their price remain the same or even decrease. This seemly contradictory phenomenon reflects the nature of competition----improvement. In fact, all competitors improve themselves in a competition. And the businessmen are motivated by competition, they chase after advance technology and lower cost, all of which serve us well.

Forging these two provisos, under some circumstances, undue competition do has negative than a positive effect. One example illustrates this points involved the elites of discipline Olympics Games in China. If gold medal in such competition means that the winner can advance to undergraduate study without any university entrace exam which is a grueling task for most Chinese high school students. In the same time, teachers usually sway the most clever students in class to take part in this competition in order for higher entrance rate. However, they tend to place too much emphasis on the result of the competition and ignore the cultivation of interest, which actually will benefit the student in academic study in long run. Teachers are reluctant to answer students' questions which have nothing to do with the competition. And those elites are also tend to ignore some aspects of the discipline he/she engaged considering those aspects are not involved in the exam. Such undue utilitarian finally make these discipline in which the elites should have great interest boring and tedious. In the respect, it is understandable that why the most winners of the competition do not choose the discipline which brought them fame as major.

In general speaking, competition is beneficial since the nature of competition is a process of improvement. We should not pay too much attention to the result of competition because this idea deviates from the original intent of competition. In fact, if people shift their cynosures from result to process, every competitor is winner to some extend. Conversely, if we only care the result of competition, every participant stands to be a loser given the fact that they all miss the most valuable part of competition.

To sum up, whether competition is more positive or detrimental depends on people's attitude. In order to be benefited from competition, we should place more emphasis on the process of it rather its result. In this light, there are no losers in the competition and we are all winners.