■ Directions: You will have 45 minutes to plan and compose a response that presents your perspective on a topic you select. A response on any topic other that then one you select will receive a score of zero. You will have a choice between two Issue topics. Each topic will appear as a brief quotation that states or implies an issue of general interest. You are free to accept, reject, or qualify the claim made in the topic, as long as the ideas you present are clearly relevant to the topic you select. Support your views with reasons and examples drawn from such areas as your reading, experience, observations, or academic studies.
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▶ Your Answer : Every society has its own problems in political, economic, and social areas. In order to deal with those problems, multiple modern societies adopt laws as its solution. However, some people argue that laws cannot solve those problems because laws are not able to change what people think, which is the most important thing. Although there are reasons to support this argument, this essay would be mainly focused on the beneficial facet of laws in that there are numerous cases where laws have made a significant change in our society.
Admittedly, it is hard to change people’s mind with laws. This is because laws are made to limit people’s behavior, not to change the way they think. Let me take an example of a speed limit at a highway. When there is a speed limit, people obey this rule and control their vehicle slower than the limit. However, it does not mean that those people are changed into passive and slow drivers. Actually, people tend to speed up over the limit when there is no camera and slow down again when there is a camera. Considering these people make accidents when speeding up, speed limiting law might seem to fail to make driving slower and prevent accidents. In addition, laws are sometimes inefficient and inevitably imperfect. There must be cases where an innocent person gets punished or person who has done evil deeds is released without any penalty. Those examples might make people think this society is unjust, and strengthen their immoral point of view. As such, laws might not be a perfect way to solve every problem in our society.
However, there are numerous cases where laws have made our society better. Even though laws cannot immediately change people’s mind, they can at least lower the number of crimes. For instance, our legal system prohibits murder and physical violence. Although some people have violent and belligerent nature, they tend to stop their actions beforehand, afraid of the punishment. Were it not for the laws, there would be much more murders and violent actions committed. This is beneficial to our society because overall violence level of our society is declined and a smaller number of victims are generated despite the intact belligerent nature of those people. When there is no alternative method to decrease the crimes, laws should be necessary to our society.
On top of that, although laws might not be able to immediately change what people think, there might be a long-term effect of laws. In this modern society, laws and education are not detachable. When a new law is legislated, teachers and parents would teach this notions to their kids in order not to make them be punished. A typical example of these cases is a discrimination banning policy. In a number of states in the United States, obvious sexist/racist discriminating remarks might be punished. Considering that our society is becoming less sexist and racist before this legislation, this positive movement is partially due to the laws. It is true that there were numerous resistance regarding these rules and a number of un-punished racist/sexist remarks right after the legislation, which is coming from an unchanged notion among people. However, this is becoming better as our society accepts the system and people adapt to the rule. Thus, it seems plausible to say that laws can have a long-term effect on the mind of people.
To sum up, whether laws can deal with many problems in our society is of high interest. Although our legal system has flaws which include the given reason, it seems reasonable to depend on the system considering the immediate alleviating effect and possible long-term change of notion among people. |
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