ISSUE88【CSMY作文互改小组】第七次作业， 限时完成，有拍必回

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Issue88 [总频67]"Technologies not only influence but actually determine social customs and ethics."【翻译】技术不仅仅影响而且实际上是决定了社会传统和道德规范。
WORDS: 561          TIME: 上午 12:45:00          DATE: 2007-1-23
[本文章先列了提纲，然后限时完成，其后只更正了误拼]

History has witness the development of human society, including not only its technologies but also its customs and ethics. Some people may hold the opinion that social customs and ethics are determined by technologies, whereas others disagree with the former and think that there are many social customs and ethics unchanged. In my point of view, on the one side, I agree with the speaker that technologies influence the customs and ethics, but on the other side I doubt the rightness that technologies determine the social customs and ethics.

Admittedly, the progress of technologies actually produces drastic influence on the social customs in the long run. From the very beginning of civilization, people had little knowledge about the outside world and they attributed a lot of natural phenomena like famine, flood and earthquake to the decision of deity. They were afraid of offending the deity and created hosts of totems for adoration. They even sacrificed livestock to wish for deity's favor. In such kind of ways, they could explain and understood a large amount of mysterious things happened around them. A lot of customs and ethics we today even enjoy are coming from this originality. With the coming of new era of technological innovation, science provides abundant knowledge to explain the natural phenomena which were thought mysterious in the ancient time and make people understand the inner of those things. It is even possible for scientists living in the modern society to predict or foretell the exact time or location of the occurrence of those phenomena, which turn people's attitude toward deity from positive to negative. Majority of them don't believe the deity any more and pay more attention to the technologies and skills that inevitably improve their living conditions and the progress of the whole society.

However, although technologies pose an positive impact on the change of social customs and ethics, a great number of social customs and ethics are not influenced such as Thanksgiving Day, which does means to memorize the history of the misery originality of America foundation. This day is so meaningful that though Americans enjoy the very convenience of the present technologies and science, they will never change the customs of celebrating this day because from the ceremony, the old generation can arouse the responsibility of the young citizens. Therefore, not all customs and ethics are changing with the progress of the technologies.

Moreover, although many concepts are experiencing rigorous test, they still keep the same because these concepts constitute the basic foundation of people's surviving, living and communicating. For example, the precious traditions of honesty or keeping one's word, working hard and being brave, loving of one's country and even pursuing the freedom to practice one's faith and equality would never change in whichever country. The technologies will not and cannot determine the utmost fundaments of a country's customs like these, but they can influence the improvement of these traditions toward a better level. Therefore, we cannot depend so much on technologies to determine the social customs and ethics.

In conclusion, the technologies actually influence the social customs and ethics a lot and to some extent even change them, but the factors influenced the development of social customs and ethics are so many that technologies as one of the primary ingredients would not have the power to change them, even not to say determining them.