[i习作temp] ISSUE125! 限时。GGJJ们，我也知道我很过分，一下贴了这么多。SORRY！还是麻烦大 [复制链接]

spritney
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发表于 2005-4-1 14:33:08 |显示全部楼层

Issue125: 689 words 45 minutes
The past is no predictor of the future.

There is always an ideal that human beings would be able to predict and foresee the future at some day. It is true that most, if not all, of us do not possess the capability that to forecast the situation that we have not gone through. However, we can, to some extent, predict the future based on the past experiences from which we can draw some theories and rules, no matter that there are always unexpected situations (circumstances) out of our prediction and control.

History is a mirror which reflects what we were in the past and where we are at present. From studying history, we can draw and generalize many rules and theories explaining how the world is running. For example, in the discipline of economics, there are many theories that concluded from the research based on the historic evidence. Let us take a look at the supply-and-demand theory. The economists took a study on the historic data concerning the price and the amount of supply and demand of a certain commodity. They found that when the supply amount rises while the demand does not, the price will decrease. In contrary, when the demand amount decline while the supply remain the same, the price will also decrease. From this and other researches, the economists concluded the classical ecomonic theory of demand and supply, which became the basis of the latter research and studies in the field of economics.

Based on the rules drawn from the history, human beings are becoming able to predict the situation in the future, although it may not be that accurate. When the conditions are according with the assumptions (premises) of the rules or theories, if the situation will last, we can forecast the future to some extent. Let us continue to take the example discussed above. Supposing that the supply of rice will be insufficient this year because of the bad weather, we can almost ensure that the price of rice will increase, assuming that there is no importation. Because rice is essential to our survival, we need it no matter whether it is sufficient or not. Thus, people with the same demand will not be able to get enough rice in the market, which leads to the almost definite consequence that the price of rice will go up, since rice is inadequate compared to the demand of it.

However, some people would claim that the situation discussed above can not be extended to all the aspects in our lives, since there are always many things that we can not predict based on the past while there was not similar situation or data to draw rules from at all. I concede that there indeed are certain situations like this. For example, the recent Indian Ocean Tsunami is a terrible disaster that we did not predict. However, it does not necessarily indicate that history is no predictor of future. At least, we can record the data and information about it this time, and then we can establish a system to moniter and analyze. Thus, we can predict the situation in the future based on the data of this time, which will be the history then. In terms of this, we can also see that historic is a predictor, to some extent, of the future.

Although the past provides us so much experience and records on which we can depend to predict the coming situations, it does not mean that we can be released totally (entirely). The history can not be able to foresee the future automatically. In fact, we need to collect, analyze, draw (elicit) rules from them and keep on observing the current situations, and then we can forecast the future to a certain extent.

Whether the future can be predicted from the past or not is indeed a big question. But it is of no doubt that if we do not make efforts to study the past data and similar circumstances, no matter how abundant the information the history has provided us, we can not be able to forecast the future. Thus, to predict the future as well as prevent the predicted incidents and disasters, we need to learn from the past, only in this way can we live better.