2014年10月25日GRE考试issue写作范文

　　题目：

　　In any field of endeavor, it is impossible to make a significant contribution without first being strongly influenced by past achievements within that field.

　　题目解析：

　　本题在题型分类上属于条件类问题中的必要条件题，题目涉及领域比较抽象，可以用分类讨论法自行选择领域分析作答。对于前人成就对未来研究的促进作用，作者持复合观点，认为在不同领域中该作用具备不同权重。范文开篇首先肯定前人成就的积极作用，在正文中分音乐与文学两个领域讨论了前人影响的必要性与局限性，进而在第三主体段进行发散，提出除纵向学习外横向的跨领域学习同样重要。

　　范文：

　　No one will deny that a study of any field, before stretching its own limbs, will gain benefits if it starts with a thorough awareness of all the former endeavors and their achievements. To make it clear, soaking in bygones is much like tracing back along the paved road and trying to clarify how the forerunners make their way towards the happy end. The benefiting mechanism is more than implicit: on one hand, the approaches utilized in the foregone endeavor are proved to be valid by all the effects achieved and thus could be generally used; on the other hand, any bygone endeavor, no matter what kind of goals it may have realized, is a trial consisting of assumption and validation, thus contributes to not only confirming the precious, but also ruling out the fallacious. Allowing for these, a more considering-worth issue, instead of questioning the sure benefit of past achievement, is that whether it is a must to be exposed to bygone influences before launching out certain endeavors, and if it is impossible to make a difference without it. Answer to this question can never be asserted, since in different fields bygones carry different weights and thus should be attached with different priorities.

　　It is unbelievable that in the field of music, which may favor originality more than any other field do, people are continuously shadowed but inspired by what the former musicians have composed. In this arena, the past achievement, by itself, makes not only a referable textbook but an indispensable brick of the later Great Wall as well. This more significant role is realized through one of the most frequently used method of producing music—sampling. By taking a portion of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument in a different piece, hip hop musicians are enabled to mix out miraculous pieces which may even outweigh the original version. Although critics and arguments centering on copyrights have never ceased, the material-oriented way of producing music has proved to be no lack of creativity and achieved huge commercial success. In this kind of music processing, alterations of the music’s tone, pitch, mode, or tempo, all will add to the magic of turning good into best, but none of these miracles will be realized unless the musicians could have a great mastery of the “good”, i.e. he/she should be equipped with a bunch of the old records and are fully aware of the beauty of every single note within it, even if it is only some friction noise. Recalling that Hip hop musician Kurtis Blow has started the scroll of sampling with his renowned hit If I Ruled the World, it is hard to imagine what the hip hop world would be like if all the composers were deprived of the old knowledge they acquire from pioneers.

　　Nevertheless, in term of literature, another field which also features the utilization of creativity, former achievements may pose as an impediment to overcome rather than any nurturing home to rest in. There has been a discussion around the disparities among several grand names of short fiction writing, Caver, Naipaul and Munro. All three have been divined as the “Chekhov” in their own country. However, that glowing praise has another way of interpretation, which may reveal some dark side of the influence of our ancestors: Chekhov has stood as the Mount Everest in the world of short stories and since his time, all the efforts devoted to short fiction writing resemble climbing the mount—no matter how hard he tried, Caver was only approaching the peak from the southern side, while Munro from the northern side. It seems like Chekhov has set the envelop of all the future activities and the new comers have no chance of hiking off. A similar case took place in China. When Mo Yan won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, he was questioned for the origin of his magic realistic works. People tried to trace when each of his works was created and if he had read Márquez’s stories at the time of writing, in order to detect any possible correlations between the two writers. An exaggerate saying has it that Márquez has depleted every single artistry of writing novels. However, even admitting there is some truth in it, is it impossible for another brain of other places and times to create new pieces, at least of similar greatness, without being influenced by the former ones? In other words, can originality be repeated, but not copied? In this scenario, over stress on the former achievement will no doubt dampen the creativity sprung from independent thinking.

　　And moreover, learning should never only take place between different time spots, but across various fields of the same period as well. In the field of journalism, where professionalism favors instant reacts rather than long-run reference, former achievement may not play such a significant part as those of other fields do. Instead, a multi-background knowledge base carries a lot more weight. Although a journalist who owns a historical view will surely benefit from the former’s experience, considering that the world is merging into one huge entity and that one man’s energy is inevitably subject to limitedness, it is of more practical use to be familiar with economics, politics and other subjects of political or social science to produce a qualified report.

　　Before reaching the conclusion of the necessity of refering to the past, it is essential to ask a lot more questions. As pointed out in the introduction, past achievements majorly show their effects in two ways, handing down artistry and eliminating unsound alternatives. However, is the past artistry always in need for the contemporary efforts? Is it possible that it may serve as a confinement instead of excitement, deviation instead of inspiration? Moreover, is it possible that some alternatives excluded by forerunners turn out to be valid due to the recent theoretical or practical advancement in that field? All the above possibilities have been confirmed or eliminated in different circumstances, which illustrates that whether it is a necessary condition to learn the foregone knowledge when seeking for any field achievement is definitely an open question.