GMAT考试写作指导：Issue写作范文四三

　　43. Examining history makes us better people insofar as it helps us to understand our

　　world. It would seem, therefore, that history would also provide useful clues for dealing

　　with the same social ills that have plagued societies throughput history. On balance,

　　however, the evidence suggests otherwise.

　　Admittedly, history has helped us learn the appropriateness of addressing certain

　　issues, particularly moral ones, on a societal level. Attempts to legislate morality

　　invariably fail, as illustrated by Prohibition in the 1930s and, more recently, failed

　　federal legislation to regulate access to adult material via the Internet. We are slowly

　　learning this lesson, as the recent trend toward legalization of marijuana for medicinal

　　purposes and the recognition of equal rights for same-sex partners both demonstrate.

　　However, the overriding lesson from history about social ills is that they are here

　　to stay. Crime and violence, for example, have troubled almost every society. All

　　manner of reform, prevention, and punishment have been tried. Today, the trend appears

　　to be away from reform toward a tough-on-crime approach. Is this because history

　　makes clear that punishment is the most effective means of eliminating crime? No;

　　rather, the trend merely reflects current mores, attitudes, and political climate. Also

　　undermining the assertion that history helps us to solve social problems is the fact that,

　　despite the civil-rights efforts of Martin Luther King and his progenies, the cultural gap

　　today between African-Americans and white Americans seems to be widening. It seems

　　that racial prejudice is here to stay. A third example involves how we deal with the

　　mentally ill segment of the population. History reveals that neither quarantine, nor

　　treatment or accommodation solves the problem, only that each approach comes with its

　　own tradeoffs.

　　To sum up, while history can teach us lessons about our social problems, more

　　often than not the lesson is that there are no solutions to many social problems―only

　　alternate ways of coping with them.