16514 谢振礼 TOEFL Essay: 本性难移 Does personality change with age?
TOEFL Independent Writing
托福独立写作
ielts360toefl@163.com
真题 Essay Topic:
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Personality changes with age. Use specific reasons and
examples or details to support your answer.
谢振礼原创范文 Example Essay by Jeenn Lee Hsieh:
Does an individual's personality change with age--can change, do change, or actually change? Some psychologists
believe that personality is brought about by biological processes, while others say that it is developed over time
when a person grows old. However, most theorists claim that the individual difference in characteristic patterns of
thinking, feeling, and behaving is formed by both genetics and the environment.
To begin with, it is widely assumed that one's personality is caused by heredity or genetics rather than by nurture or the environment. Indeed, people's underlying personality traits stay pretty much the same throughout their lives
from their childhood years to after they are over the hill. Many people seem to believe that who they are now is no
different from who they will be forever. Thus, given that everybody's personality can be altered by the environment
to some extent, these biological characteristcs are impervious to change and therefore persist through an
individual's lifespan. This theory seems to follow the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud who suggested that
personality was set in stone by the tender age of five. In other words, personality is relatively fixed and stable
throughout life.
As well, personality is modeled by the changing environment, and such change is constant. Common sense has it
that, despite the genetic factor, one's personality changes with age from stage to stage. To illustrate, personalities
change due to life events, such as starting relationships or a career, which influence the way people think, feel and
behave. Among other examples, as men reach middle age and beyond, they appear to care more about their work, responsibilities, and those loved ones in the family, and they also become less open to meeting new people,
whereas women become less neurotic and extroverted. More often than not, the idea that personality changes with age seems to be a matter of cause and effect. For instance, researchers explain that being happy earlier in life
could change a person's personality in his or her later years.
In sum, personality is partly related to genetics and partly to the environment, with each factor playing a role in
forming a person's network of thoughts, feelings, and behavioral patterns that differs one person to another. It
may be assumed that personality is a mixture of what is innate by nature and what is learned from childhood to
adulthood until death. If change is inevitable, all people grow older but not all of them become better individuals.
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