ETS官网GRE5分范文欣赏

　　Surely many of us have expressed the following sentiment, or some variation on it, during our daily commutes¹ to work: "People are getting so stupid these days!" Surrounded as we are by striding and strident automatons² with cell phones glued to their ears, PDA's gripped in their palms, and omniscient³, omnipresent CNN gleaming in their eyeballs, it's tempting⁴ to believe that technology has isolated⁵ and infantilized us, essentally transforming us into dependent, conformist morons⁶ best equipped to sideswip one another in our SUV's.

　　Furthermore, hanging around with the younger, pre-commute generation, whom tech-savviness seems to have rendered lethal⁷, is even less reassuring⁸. With "Teen People" style trends shooting through the air from tiger-striped PDA to zebra-striped PDA, and with the latest starlet gossip zipping from juicy Blackberry to teeny, turbo-charged cell phone, technology seems to support young people's worst tendencies to follow the crowd. Indeed, they have seemingly evolved into intergalactic conformity⁹ police. After all, today's tech-aided teens are, courtesy of authentic¹⁰, hands-on video games, literally¹¹ trained to kill; courtesy of chat and instant text messaging, they have their own language; they even have tiny cameras to efficiently¹² photodocument your fashion blunders! Is this adolescence¹³, or paparazzi terrorist training camp?

　　With all this evidence, it's easy to believe that tech trends and the incorporation¹⁴ of technological¹⁵ wizardry into our everyday lives have served mostly to enforce conformity, promote dependence¹⁶, heighten comsumerism and materialism¹⁷, and generally create a culture that values self-absorption and personal entitlement over cooperation and collaboration¹⁸. However, I argue that we are merely in the inchoate¹⁹ stages of learning to live with technology while still loving one another. After all, even given the examples provided earlier in this essay, it seems clear that technology hasn't impaired²⁰ our thinking and problem-solving capacities. Certainly it has incapacitated our behavior and manners; certainly our values have taken a severe blow. However, we are inarguably more efficient in our badness these days. We're effective worker bees of ineffectiveness!

　　If T\technology has so increased our senses of self-efficacy that we can become veritable agents of the awful, virtual CEO's of selfishness, certainly it can be beneficial. Harnessed correctly, technology can improve our ability to think and act for ourselves. The first challenge is to figure out how to provide technology users with some direly-needed direction.

　　Reader Commentary for Essay Response — Score 5The language of this essay clearly illustrates²¹ both its strengths and weaknesses. The flowery and sometimes uncannily keen descriptions are often used to powerful effect, but at other times this descriptive language results in errors in syntax. See, for example, the problems of parallelism in the second-to-last sentence of paragraph 2 ("After all, today's tech-aided teens ...").

　　There is consistent evidence of facility with syntax and complex vocabulary ("Surrounded as we are by striding and strident automatons with cell phones glued to their ears, PDA's gripped in their palms, and omniscient, omnipresent CNN gleaming in their eyeballs, it's tempting to believe..."). However, such lucid²² prose is often countered by an over-reliance on abstractions and tangential²³ reasoning. For example, what does the fact that video games "literally train [teens] to kill" have to do with the use or deterioration²⁴ of thinking abilities??

　　Because this essay takes a complex approach to the issue (arguing, in effect, that technology neither enhances nor reduces our ability to think for ourselves, but can do one or the other, depending on the user) and because the author makes use of "appropriate vocabulary and sentence variety," a score of 5 is appropriate.

 

分享到：