05248 unfriendly
托福议论文：论不友善
猫头鹰在线写作实验室
Jeenn Lee Hsieh 谢振礼
TOEFL Essay 真题大意：
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? "People today are not as friendly as people were in the past."
Use specific reasons and examples to support your opinion.
范文原创：Jeenn Lee Hsieh
In the modern society as we know it, there is a strange perception that being friendly is somewhat out of fashion. What seems to prevail is the common feeling of being increasingly business-like and independent, so much so that people are not as amicable today as people were in the past. Probably, such popular tendency is caused by two factors: money and liberty.
Nowadays, it seems that people are especially concerned about gaining cash than gaining friendship. Ours is an age of materialism and it seems that anything and everything has something to do with financial aims. For one thing, the high living costs may render it next to impossible for most people to strike a balance between making money and making friends. In a business world, chances are that people could be disoriented, confused, and frustrated in such a manner that they would turn themselves into a chilly state of aloofness. Even though people are literally connected electronically 24/7 anywhere, this does little to bring them together the same friendly way it used to be, except perhaps for money. Surprisingly enough, one of Jane Austen's famous lines is more to the point today than her own time: "Business, you know, may bring money; but friendship hardly ever does."
Being economically more independent, people in general are not emotionally as close these days as only decades before. To begin with, such increased spiritual freedom actually makes people become more self-centered and unwilling to spend time in attempting to be sympathetic. It is as if mutual sympathy as the rule of friendship is no longer the usual way of social life. Moreover, you can easily make unfriendly people sour or distant or inimical than to make unfriendly people friendly. This kind of time-minded freedom is understandable because friendship is pretty much a full-time occupation if you want to be friendly with somebody by saying agreeable words. Indeed, we cannot but be reminded of the words of George Orwell: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
Consequently, it may be concluded that the pursuit of cash and the spirit of freedom contribute greatly to changing some people to be less friendly to other people, let alone to the Nature . People are inclined to become economically money-conscious and socially not much depending on each other. It looks like that everybody is free to decide on the choice between money and friendship, probably thinking that friendship is like money--easier made than kept. (pigai zuowen ielts360toefl@hotmail.com Jeenn Lee Hsieh)
