Issue38

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Issue 38

"In the age of television, reading books is not as important as it once was. People can learn as much by watching television as they can by reading books."

Words: 668                          Times:  1h+

提纲：
Para 1 . 陈述观点：虽然电视有很多好处，但书籍在很多方面仍不可取代
Para 2 . 指出电视在教育中的作用
Para 3 . 指出书籍比电视更便宜，携带使用更方便
Para 4 . 电视不能很好的表达书中的一些内容，并以小说为例
Para 5 . 指出由于商业目的，电视不可能大量制作教育性节目
Para 6 . 指出电视节目不易查找和翻阅，而且由于其易失性，不能作为长期和可靠的学习来源
Para 7 . 结论

This is an era filled with various products of advanced technology, and television is a most notable one of them that greatly influence the pattern of modern people’s life. Since the superficial success of the TV culture, some people, just like the speaker, claim that we can learn as much by watching television as by reading, and therefore books is not as important as it once was. Although television actually has advantages in some respects, books still play an indispensable role in most areas of education.

Admittedly, television provides enhancements to the traditionally education. By using television or its video tapes, teachers can show images and pictures that can hardly printed on the pages of books, helping students to gain a further understanding about those abstract conceptions. For example, we can see the whole procedure of fetus’s growth, from zygote to a complete infant, in an edited video tape, which makes students’ study more efficient by directly exhibiting an untouchable biological process in front of them, and which is unimaginable in time before television appeared. Besides, television also provide us an effective way to approach the latest news of the events happened all over the world each day. With the useful information we can make plan s for our work and study more easily than ever.

In my opinion, however, the author fail to consider some distinct merit of books, which makes this kind of medium of learning irreplaceable in certain respects. First of all, books have obvious advantages in the cost and convenience over television. We need only spend much less money to get what we need in study from books than to buy a TV set and order specific educational programs. Additionally, it is impossible that every classroom and library to prepare TV sets and necessary resources for students’ study and the finite number of machines also can not satisfy each student’s needs. On the other hand, we can easily find books in libraries, book stores or on Internet, and carry them to any place we want. They do not need electricity and batteries to motivate, and a light is enough for us to read them. In short, books ease our study.

The speaker also ignores the fact that many kinds of books can not be well expressed by the mean of television, especially when it comes to the fiction. Since people usually have different views about the content and characters in a fiction, the actors’ performance according to their own understanding can hardly receive audiences’ acceptance, and even may distort the fiction’s true meaning because of misapprehension. That is the reason why many films adapted from famous fiction can not obtain successes. Accordingly, television can not be claimed as an effective way of study for such as art students.

Another point of contention with the speaker has to do with the objective of television industry: the maximal profit. With the guide of this purpose, TV maker are more interested in products such as films, serials and entertainment programs rather than educational ones which need huge amount of time and investment but can only get relatively low return. That means that what we receive from the television is mostly those programs full of sex and violence, which contribute more negative impact to education.

Finally, books readily enable readers to review and reference materials in several areas at the same time, but television can not. Even a video tape that recorded the content is far more trouble than it is worthy. And since the characteristics of TV programs, which are to disappear in a shot period of time after having broadcasted, television can not be an abiding and reliable resource for education.

To summarize, although television is indeed have advantages in some respects to improve people’s education, it still can not replace books as the main source of obtaining knowledge in current society. But as the development of science and technology, we may one day use television to study as cheap and convenient as books today, and in that time books would really be useless in our life.