2005/07/18

Practice for writing #4

Topic: It has been said, “Not everything that is learned is contained in books.” Compare and contrast knowledge gained from experience with knowledge gained from books. In your opinion, which source is more important? Why?

In my opinion, Books can give more knowledge than experience can do and I think Books is more important than experience.
First, let’s think about experience. Experience is important part of humans’ lives because we can be gained knowledge through talking people and watching their actions or watching nature. For example, when I was child, I often saw the sunset and thought “The sun set different places through the year.” However, knowledge gained from experience is limited. We can learn it only through our experience, but we can’t gain it from what I can’t experience.
On the other hands, books teach me everything that I want to know. From them, we can learn not only the knowledge in usual life in novels but also historical and academic knowledge. Can we get knowledge about Queen Elizabeth Ⅰthrough the experience? Can we go to the universe and learn something? I think both of them are impossible. However, books have a magical power to meet Queen Elizabeth Ⅰor lead us and make us possible to see so many stars in the universe.
From that point, I think that books make us possible to know whatever we want to know, and are able to gain knowledge.

1 comment:

Ellen said...

But how do we know if the books teach us about what really happened? Aren't many books biased? How can we trust the books we read -- especially history books?

Of course experience is biased, too. Everyone sees things through their own biased eyes. Even if we hear about a certain part of history from someone who actually experienced it, his or her version will probably be different from someone else who experienced the same thing.