谢振礼 托福范文: 可靠之友
TOEFL Independent Writing
Topic:
What do you want most in a friend—someone who is intelligent, or someone who has a sense of humor, or someone who is reliable? Which of these characteristics is most important to you?
Use reasons and specific examples to explain your choice.
Essay:
It is by chance we meet people and it is by choice we make friends with someone who is funny, or someone who is smart, or someone who is reliable. Of these characteristics, reliability is the best choice when choosing a person as a friend. While humor or intelligence may serve a purpose, only those who are reliable are offering more to help us tide over our difficulties in life.
For different reasons, we may want humor or intelligence in a friend, this being independent of the reliability factor. To begin with, having a friend with a sense of humor may be an advantage, and in all areas of life looking for a reason to laugh is necessary. Choosing a friend with whom we can have fun may help us to get through the dull times, enjoy the good times, tolerate the unpleasant times, and overcome the unbearable times. For example, laughing heartily with friends may turn out to be a good medicine in life that is sometimes sick with its stress and complexity. Then, as with regard to very high IQ in a friend, it is likely that we may benefit from getting automatically an intelligence boost. It is as if to say, the more intelligent our friends are, the more intelligent we may become, whether you believe it or not.
All that being explained, neither humor nor intelligence is as valuable as reliability in a friend because in this world trustful people are relatively rare and hard to find. Thus, we are sure that things are never quite as scary as long as we have got a reliable friend. When we are in trouble, a friend who is reliable walks in whereas others tend to walk out and talk about us behind our back. Typically, the shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends, therefore only in times of adversity can we realize who are our reliable friends and who are not. At this point, it is doubtful whether or not someone who has a sense of humor or someone who is intelligent might be a reliable friend. When it comes to making true friends and avoiding fake friends, we would like to believe that a doubtful person is worse than an enemy; and an unreliable person should be nobody’s friend.
In conclusion, a reliable friend is someone who will help us when in need, which is more than what we can say for someone who simply has a sense of humor or someone who is only intelligent. Ultimately, reliability is the most important characteristic to us when choosing a friend. To have reliable friends in life, chances are many but choices are few.
