TOEFL Independent Essay Topic 4: Learning about the past

Although we live in present time with different facilities and different needs, in my point of view learning about the past is really useful. By studying about past generations and past events, we can learn how to choose our way to success and do our bests to reach our goals, and also what to do or even not to do in various conditions.

Firstly, studying history of last people has taught me so many lessons; such as what I learnt about Avicena, one of the famous phisicians in iran living about 300 years before, who was really genius and had made basic changes in medicine in his time. Eventhough there were lack of diagnostic facilities , he did his job in the best way. Another example is Marie curie, the winer of nobel prize for two times. She has been my favorite personality since my childhood. Studying her life learnt me how to challenge with unwanted conditions and never give up. Both of these people had influenced me so much to try hard to get what is important to me, specially in my academic life.

Besides, we can use past generations'experiences, not to try what has been tried. when we study about consequences of some past actions, there will not be any necessity to try the same function again. For instance, they saved running water behind small dams to use it in more efficient way, and nowaday we use their experiences to build huge dams not to waste valuable water or even change it's moving energy to electricity. Another personal example is about what I heard about my grandfather. The story is that he got schoarship from university of Colombia when he was 22 years old and he decided not to go there because of being scared to become homesick and in this way he missed what would changed his life totaly. This event taught me not to loss great opportunities so simply.

In conclusion, I think we can learn so valuable lessons from the past. It includes the process they have passed to reach their goals and the advantageous or disadvantageous experiences they had made in their lives.

It is a say: "The world is ever changing." Everything has their past, present, and future. If a person just lives with the gorgeous past but forget his present, he will destroy himself someday in the future. However, should we live in the modern world without any idea about the past? If we do so, our future, in my opinion, will be a cluster of faults. By learning from history, and my own experience I realize that people cannot live without the past.

There are many examples in history indicating that people succeed by learning from failing. American, for instance, after defeated many times in the war against British, they found the reason making their failing and fixed it in order to transform their weakness into their strenght. As the result of that, they won the important battles to defeat British and gained the independence afterward.

In addition, the past is the first bricks to build the whole wall in the future. Who can solve math problems without knowing how to calculate? Who can do the advanced when he/ she has no idea about the basis? The answer of both question is "no body". For many of my friends, math is very hard; but for me, it is an interesting subject. Because I have had a good basis and logical thinking at math since I studied this subject seven years ago, approaching the harder problems are much easier for me than my friends.

In conclusion, the success of a person is strongly related to the past of him/her. If we can realize the past as the experience to change ourselves, make us better, we will be very successful in the future.

Hi Jason,
Can you fix this essay for me. I need to write as much as possible now because i'm gonna take the toefl on this Sat.
Thank you very much!
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Sonvan

thank you very much. Your advices are really helpful for me. :)

Hi MR.Jason
Right now I saw your evaluation. I'm really happy to understand the important key points in writing an essay, as this is completely different with what we have in our native language.

Thanks for your concern. I did learn a lot from you, even more than what my personal teacher taught me during last 2 months! Hope to make it in speaking part too.
Thanks a lot
Elika

thank you very much! So, what I actually need is the appropriate introduction for my body paragraph, rite? Now I understand how important the introduction is. It leads the audience to the right points that I make in the body paragraph.
However, do you think I should write the body paragraph before the introduction? Because when I finish to argue, I will know what exactly i'm talking about and make the introduction clearer.

Hi Jason, could you please review my essay. I wrote it within 30 minutes as your suggestion. Thanks :)
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There are many elements for making decisions such as knowledge, technology and experience. The experience is very important to live presently with the following reasons.

Firstly, the past play the important role for individual learning. For my personal experience, I learned from the health statistics that there are huge number of people who died because of smoking every year. This behavior is a main course of the lung cancer. Therefore, I avoid to smoke because I do not want to die from lung cancer as those people.

Secondly, the history also provides good lessons for societies. For instance, people consumed enormous environmental resources in the industrialization era. Factories were built all over the world without any regulations. Nowadays, there are global warming problems around the world. People now realize that they have to launch the regulations related to environment in order to save the planet for the next generation.

However, some people believe that the past has gone, they will concentrate only the present. I think that this idea will lead people to repeat the same mistakes. How pity it is if we have many good historical lessons but we ignore them.

To sum up, I strongly agree that the past have value for individuals and societies. People can use the lessons from the history to improve the present and avoid to repeat the same mistakes.
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If every generation had to reinvent everything that had been discovered in the past, people would still be in the dark and with no fire! There is one idiom that says: "To know where you are going, you have to know where you are comming from".Therefore, one can say that the past is the key to the present and the building block of the future.

There are many examples in today's world that prove the relevence of the past, for instance the discovery of the steam-/pressure-motor in England. This discovery was the beginning of the industrial developement as people come to benefit in the present time. As a result of this discovery, the society became healthier, because people did not have to perform certain hardwork that they had to do in past, before the pressure-motor.

Another example that is an evidence of the importance of the past, is the documents of Leonardo Di Vinci. This genius put in place some remarquable documents about a flying objects, and as reported by scientists, these documents from Di Vinci were used in conceiving parachutes, even airplanes as people know them today.

One can say, that the past is important for many reasons, beside those mentioned above. The past helps people correct their mistakes by not repeting it, and by figuring out other alternatives. For instance, past wars have shown the humanity how to avoid conflicts and how to resolve them.

To sum up, it has to be said that the past is a tresor that the present and the future need for the sake of their own survival.

P.S. I did a five body paragraph, I indented each paragraph and I can not explain why it came out this way, as shown above...Sorry!

When I was thirteen I was bored from all the history classes in high school, learning about the Rome Empire did not made sense to me at all I asked myself the question: What has the Roman Empire to do with myself. When I was seventeen I finally realized that learning from the past and in this case learning from history is tremendously important for the following two reasons.

For once, learning from history and in particular from history which is referring to the origins of your country could give you an idea about the national identity and it´s development in the long run. For instance, the knowledge I gained from school about the first and especially about the Second World War had a huge impact on my national identity. From that point forward when I was visiting foreign countries I was not too proud to be from Germany, neither was I ashamed, but I was more cautious and respectful to other cultures. This attitude helped me to learn much from foreign cultures and their habits, I was in fact more open minded because I was not thinking that my culture and nation was superiority compared to the foreign cultures.

Secondly, creativity is becoming more and more important in our working world because most of the contemporary jobs are based on knowledge. So you might ask yourself, what has this to do with learning from the past? For instance think about an artist, or to be more particular, suppose you are a painter. Your work has to be influenced by all the great artists from the past, to name just a few: Van Gogh or Warhol. If you would ignore their cutting edge techniques and performances your paintings might be very odd. My thesis is that in hindsight if you want to belong to the avant-garde, or in other words, if you want to create something new that inspires other people, you have to learn from the people, who already were the avant-garde in your field in the past.

In conclusion, I think there are plenty of good reasons why we should learn form the past and the two reasons I described above are my two main reasons why I changed my mind and why I am in fact trying to learn every day from the past to improve my life.