Issue31 mettle小组

zhangjing106UID: 2157010

I agree that the speaker’s assertion is correct that the money spent on research is being well invested. However, the speaker ignores some failed researches, which are not good investment, and the speaker also considers wrong that people can foreknow the result of a research. My points of the contention with the speaker involve the basic objectives of research, as discussed below.

Research is a basic way to solve the many kinds of enduring problems of human races, such as air pollution, cancer and AIDS. During the recent decades, research has helped us know ourselves and the world around us. But it is also a smart decision to end the research whose objectives are vague and whose potential benefits are speculative. After all, research always spends expensive money and has significant opportunity costs. The money may be spent on society’s immediate problems that do not need research. For example, in some provinces of China, millions of money has used in promoting the level of education and the improving the establishments of schools in order to solve the problems that many children of school age have no opportunities to go to school.

Moreover, some controversial problems should be solved not by research but by social reform, economics and law. And no research could solve the problems of war, poverty and violence, which stem from certain aspects of human nature, such as aggression and greed. Furthermore, the research is a two-edged sword, which can bring us suffering when it provides advanced enjoyments, such as the power of atom and chemical weapons.

In sum, the speaker’s assertion that we should invest in research whose results are controversial begs the question, because we can not know whether research will turn out controversial until we have invest in it. So I concede that money spent on research is a sound investment because it is an investment in the advancement of knowledge and in human imagination. In the final analysis, we should strike a balance in allocating resource between social objectives and research.