You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.
Which one you think has more influence on people- the knowledge gained from experience or the knowledge gained from books. In your opinion, which source is more important? Why?
You should write at least 250 words.
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.
Sample Answer 1:
Throughout the human life, people will always be in special circumstances. They should make an important decision like choosing their life partners or a convenient major for their future. Today the books are proper resources of knowledge, which can play a significant role to inform people in almost all fields. However, in my opinion, books cannot be useful for personal stuff as well as personal experience, because of some reasons, which are elucidated below.
First of all, although books are a suitable resource and let us know about others’ experiences, it cannot be helpful in personal problems. As it has known to everybody, the attitude of one person is totally different from another one. For example, two people in the same situation make two dissimilar decisions. As a result, the experiences which are gathered from books cannot be constructive for people to cope with their troubles.
Furthermore, personal experiences are more deeply and penetrate into our subconscious, since we were in the situation and we felt all of the things that happened to us. It is more influential than just reading them in the books. Recently, researchers have depicted that human always learn everything better when they observe them with their eyes or touch them. For instance, the students who had been taught in a laboratory got better marks in their exam than those who had taught verbally.
In conclusion, I personally think, the influences of books are superficial. When we go through the problems which we read exactly the same one on the book before, we usually perform our instructions rather than doing what authors said. On the contrary, personal experiences have a profound impact on our decisions which we will make in the future.
(Approximately285words)
(This model answer was written by – Sanaz Golmakani.)
Sample Answer 2:
“Experience is the best teacher” is an old cliché , and I agree with it since experiences enrich a person’s wisdom and teach him/her invaluable lessons that can never be learned from elsewhere . We can learn a lot of important things from books, and books tell us about the past, present and future, but the most important lessons in life come from our own experiences. Throughout the different stages of life, from primary school to university to adulthood, experience teaches us many skills we need for life.
As children in primary school, we learn facts and information from books, but that is not all we learn in school. On the playground, we learn how to make friends. In our class work, we learn how it feels to succeed and what we do when we fail. We start to learn about the things we like to do and the things we don’t. We don’t learn these things from books, but from our experiences with our friends and classmates.
In our university classes, we learn a lot of information and skills we will need for our future careers, but we also learn a lot that is not in our textbooks. In our daily lives both in the class and out of the class, we learn to make decisions for ourselves. We learn to take on responsibilities. We learn to get along with our classmates, our roommates, and our workmates. Our successes and failures help us develop skills we will need in our adult lives. They are skills that no book can teach us. Throughout our adulthood, the experience remains a constant teacher. We may continue to read or take classes for professional development. However, our experiences at work, at home, and with our friends teach us more. The triumphs and disasters of our lives teach us how to improve our careers and also how to improve our relationships and how to be the person each one of us wants to be.
Books teach us a lot, but there is a limit to what they teach. They can give us information or show us another person’s experiences. These are valuable things, but the lessons we learn from our own experiences, from childhood through adulthood, are the most important ones we learn.
(Approximately377words)
(This model answer has been prepared by the site developer. However, please note that this is just one example out of many possible answers.)