2006年2月3日考题、范文及译文

考试题：

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Young people enjoy life better than older people. Use specific reasons and details to explain your opinion.

范文：

On one of his fabulous journeys, Jonathan Swift’s fictional explorer Gulliver visits an island where the Struldbrugs live. Gulliver has been told that the Struldbergs are immortal, and he imagines how wonderful it would be to live forever. But when he actually meets the Struldbergs, he finds them to be depressed and suicidal because, although they cannot die, they cannot stop aging either. What’s the point of immortal life, Swift indicates, if you cannot be in good enough physical shape to enjoy it? Older people may appreciate the wisdom that comes with age, but younger folks enjoy much more the very fact of being alive.

It mostly comes down to physical fitness. A healthy young man in his twenties, say, who breaks his leg skiing, will typically undergo a pretty short healing period before he is on the slopes again. In the meantime, he can get around quite easily on crutches. A 55-year-old skier, on the other hand, who takes a tumble, is probably looking at a rather long recovery period, disability leave from work, and a leg that will never be quite the same again. A woman might like to hang out at night clubs with her other 18-year-old friends till the wee hours of the morning until she turns 50 and realizes that she needs to be in bed by 10 in order to function the next day.

Young people are also typically more attracted to risk-taking than people of “a certain age.” If, for example, a twenty-something entrepreneur takes a chance on a new idea and then fails miserably, he can say to himself, “Well, no problem. There are lots more opportunities ahead for me to achieve great success.” Thomas Edison tried over 1000 different materials until he found the one that worked as the filament for the electric light bulb. He published his patent in 1879, when he was 32 years old. He must have thought he had plenty of time to experiment.

An old saying goes, “Youth is wasted on the young.” By the time we know what we want and how to get it, we may not be able to move very much. This is not to say that older people can’t achieve great things: John Milton was 56 years old (and blind) when he finished dictating his masterpiece, “Paradise Lost,” to his daughter. But he probably didn’t really “enjoy” the task of working so hard at a time when his physical health was failing him. (He died 10 years later of kidney failure.) The older we are, the more we are satisfied with where we have been; the younger we are, the more we enjoy the journey itself.

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