issue38

zhouwanqiu5UID: 2446439

TOPIC: ISSUE38 - "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: 523          TIME: 00:45:00          DATE: 2008-1-11 21:43:34

Nowadays, television is the necessary product in nearly every home and watching television is a part of people's life. Can television replace the books to supply knowledge as the speaker think? I don't think so. Even we watching more television than before, reading books is still more important than watching TV.

Admittedly, I agree that television is more popular than before, and reading books seem not as important as it once was. Not only children who come back home from school but also adult who arrive at home from work, the first thing may be open the TV. Also, in the weekend or the holidays, people prefer watching television to go out playing, even reading stories books is not appealing. Why? Because television programs have vivid pictures which is more interesting than book. Also, televisions always provide us the latest news but books even newspapers cannot.

However, even the television has so many advantages; I don't think it can substitute books. Compared with books, you will realize that reading books has lots of advantages which watching television cannot have. For example, books can provide us abstract ideas and deep thinking. Especially the philosophy books, they record many great men’s confound thinking, which is cannot be appeared in the television. Reading these books can cause us thinking but watching television may only cause us laugh. Also, in the history, many giants’ important theories and thinking only are recorded in books. As we know, the books which contain the ideas of Confucious and Mencious are still popular in China, even both Confucious and Mencious are dead many years ago. Thus, in this aspect, books cannot be replaced by television.

Furthermore, books can provide us systematic knowledge but television always used for entertainment. In order to get more profit and to attract more people to watch television, the programs always meet people's need for amusement. The most popular program mostly is the soap operas and people waste much time on them but gain nothing. In a word, the television can't provide us systematic intellectual knowledge as books can. However, someone would argue that, the television also has some programs to introduce useful knowledge such as animal world program and news broadcast, but compared with time we spend on these useful programs, we spend more time on recreation programs.

In addition, different from television, books are easier to carry. We can read books everywhere we want, such as offices, bookstores, classrooms even the dinner rooms. But television is not so convenient, to watch television we need electricity, cable connection, also it cannot be portable. When we go out for picnic or for travel, we can take along with a book we like, we can read it in the train, bus and plane or in the beautiful circumstance such as lawn. But television cannot be together with us in these conditions.

In the final analysis, I concede that we watch more television than before, and television do give us some useful knowledge sometimes, but all these don't mean it can substitute reading books Reading books is still a part of many people's everyday life which cannot be replaced by anything.