13822 刺激购买
IELTS Essay Topic:
雅思真题：刺激购买
2013-06-08 China
Jeenn Lee Hsieh
谢振礼通信讲座
ielts360toefl@hotmail.com
IELTS Writing Task 2
Essay Topic:
Nowadays some countries encourage people to buy more and more products, while others believe it is bad for the society. Discuss both views and give your opinion. Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience to support your answer.
Example Essay by Jeenn Lee Hsieh:
大作文素材参考(谢振礼老师)
答题立场(申论主题)：刺激购物有利于恢复景气
结构四段：起3承6转6合3(隐形模板)
In a turmoil of rising jobless rates, stimulating people to spend more is usually more effective to reverse a country's general economic slowdown known as recession.
On the contrary, warning them to spend less often turns out to be ineffective in solving the problem of unemployment, following a steady decline in creating jobs in the private sector.
To prevent a recession from becoming a depression, consumers are expected to recover the psychology to spend more, which can boost production and investment, which in turn can create more jobs and increase household income.
It is understandable why some people think that encouraging people to spend too much is bad for the society.
This issue, however, is paradoxical because often the cause and effect are the same, being either in the virtuous business cycle or in the vicious one.
The basic question is: does recession cause unemployment or the opposite is true?
Thus, those who are in favor of tightening waist belts during a recession would wonder how could people be urged to buy more and more products with less and less buying power or even with money they probably do not have?
This viewpoint makes mathematical sense, to be sure; however, the market system in the microeconomics is like "an invisible hand" (says Adam Smith) which is too hard to predict.
And who knows that extreme austerity measures would not backfire?
Economically and financially, employment is all that matters in the society.
As happening in some countries in recession, doing little or nothing to recover consumer confidence and thereby create more jobs usually does not lead to the end of a recession anytime soon.
In fact, when the worse becomes the worst, spending less in the private as well as the public sector may extend the period of a severe jobless recession, which eventually becomes the beginning of a depression in which hundreds of thousands of jobs are being lost for obvious reasons.
At this point, there is a very old joke which tells the difference between a recession and a depression.
Here lies the bitter humor: "a recession is when your neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose yours".
So the lesson is: spending more can create more jobs.
Generally speaking, encouraging people to spend more can benefit the society, given that too much consumerism sometimes has its negative effects, such as inflation and bubble-like growth.
In any case, what can really make a difference in daily life is the size of the paycheck--the bigger, the better.
True enough, spending too much is not a good virtue; nevertheless, exactly how much is too much? (Essay created by Jeenn Lee Hsieh)
