Issue 208 模考练习1

shcshc2010UID: 2876712

TOPIC: ISSUE208 - "The way people look, dress, and act reveals their attitudes and interests. You can tell much about a society's ideas and values by observing the appearance and behavior of its people."
WORDS: 657
TIME: 00:45:00
DATE: 2010-8-17 上午 09:39:16

The assertion claims that people's attitudes and interests are revealed through their look, dress, and act, and observing the appearance and behavior of the people in a society would enable you to tell much about the society's ideas and values. To some extent, I agree with the general conclusion that people's appearance will reveal some of their personalities. However, this broad assertion is unnecessarily extended to an irreversible extreme that you can tell much about a society's ideas and values just through people's appearance. On balance, I think that although you can find something through one's appearance and behavior, you need more deep analysis to find a society's nature. My agreement and contention with the assertion involve the deep and fundamental analysis discussed below.

On the one hand, I would like to admit that this assertion, although suffers from some flaws, has some merits. The implicit rationale behind it accords with common sense and experience in daily life. After all, different people do look, dress, and act differently. Firstly, people in different careers have very different dressing styles. Many careers, like doctor, police, and flight attendant require the people working in this area to dress uniforms. What's more, different people always have different styles. For example, business men always dress in a quite formal style, while artists are usually very casual about dressing, and pop singers must be dressed up in a very fashionable way. Some time, the appearance could reveal a person's personality as well as his/her career. Abraham Lincoln has said "When a man is below twenty, his appearance is determined by his parents, however, when a man is forty, he must be responsible for his own appearance." This implies that a person's attitudes towards life and special personality will be reflected in their appearance.

On the other hand, I have to point out that it is rather arbitrary to claim that you can know a person very well just through his/her appearance and the way they act. What usually happens is that people disguise themselves and only reveal parts of themselves to others, and hide the parts that they don't want others to know. In china, there is an old saying that you can never judge a person only by his appearance. Life is full of examples which can act as sound evidences supporting this saying. People who claim themselves as compatible at everything may turn out to be good at only boasting, while people who don't speak much may be very capable men in fact. In Guangdong province in China, people who dress in a very simple and casual way may turn out to be a millionaire or even a billionaire.

To be added, if you want to tell much about a society's ideas and values just by observing the appearance and behavior of its people, you need to be very sentiment to the differences between different cultures; at the same time you need a very sharp mind which is very good at analyzing. Only experts in social science have such abilities. In my opinion, for ordinary people, if you want to know a society, you should read some books about the history and the culture of the society. The local newspaper will also tell you a lot about what the people in that society care about, how do they judge things and what ideas they have about the world.

In sum, seldom can other issues be more complicated than judging a person's personality and a society's ideas and value. As far as I am concerned, while you can learn something about one's personality through the way he/ she look, dress, and act, the conclusion you get through this way couldn't be very solid. And not everyone could tell much about a society's ideas and values just by observing people's appearance and behavior, a much easier way is to read some books about the society's history and culture, as well as some local newspaper.