TOEFL® essay: Learning about the past

[Proalyssa199]

Learning about the past has no value for those of us living in the present. Do you agree or disagree with this statement?


Nowadays people, especially the youth, tend to live for the present and envisage the future but ignore or pay little attention to the past. However, History, a subject in which students are taught about the events or traditions in the past, is still compulsory in the educational system. It is open to a question if learning about the past is useful. In my opinion, it is valuable and should be sustained.

Firstly, everything at the moment is partly the corollary of the past. If we do not appreciate our routine and history, how can we venerate and promote what we have nowadays. For example, the peaceful territory of ours is what our people and soldiers, through hardship and adversity, struggled for and successfully obtained. The celebration of national day of any country is reminiscent of challenging and arduous periods of time yearning for freedom. Imagine that people do not care about the past, how can they proud of their country or try to maintain the peace they have?

The concept of the past not only includes history but also some geographic phenomena or evolution. So learning about that helps us to expatiate objects or phenomena we observe nowadays. From those theories and conclusions, it is such a pleasure to know more precious details about our surroundings. That is the second reason. It is obvious if we take the formation of our planet as an example. In the past, our continent is not separated but just an enormous mass of land on the earth. Owing to the movement inside the land surface, that continent was asunder, which forms four disparate continents as we see nowadays.

As a youngster, I am very interested in learning about the past, and I am pleased when some of the young choose it as their major subject. Learning about the past is too substantive to be rejected, and I believe that the more we appreciate our past, the better we live for our future.

TOEFL listening discussions: A conversation in a professor's office between a professor and a student