2021年1月9日托福独立写作真题与素材阅读

2021年1月9日托福独立写作真题

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?

Government should not provide financial support to artists (For example, painters, writer, musicians …), and the government should let them support themselves.

这个考题问：政府是否应当为艺术提供财务支持？

我们在这篇推文中提供了支持和反对两方面的阅读素材。考生可以借鉴其中的逻辑，也可以学习素材中的一些地道的词汇搭配和写作风格。

第一篇素材的风格和难度和托福写作比较接近，第二篇素材来自知名的经济学人杂志，某些词汇较难。考生在没有把握的情况下不应去照搬其中较难的词汇和较复杂的句型。

一、 支持资助：

我们给出的阅读素材包含了十个理由，考生可以从中选择2-3个展开论述. 比如:  improve academic performance, spark creativity and innovation, strengthen economy. 

10 Reasons to Support the Arts

The arts are fundamental to our humanity. They ennoble and inspire us—fostering creativity,goodness, and beauty. The arts bring us joy, help us express our values, andbuild bridges between cultures. The arts are also a fundamental component of ahealthy community—strengthening them socially, educationally, andeconomically—benefits that persist even in difficult social and economic times.

 

1.  Arts improve individual well-being. 69 percent of the population believe thearts “lift me up beyond everyday experiences,” 73 percent feel the artsgive them “pure pleasure to experience and participate in,” and 81 percent saythe arts are a “positive experience in a troubled world.”

2. Arts unify communities. 72 percent of Americans believe “the artsunify our communities regardless of age, race, and ethnicity” and 73 percentagree that the arts “helps me understand other cultures better”—a perspectiveobserved across all demographic and economic categories.

3. Arts improve academic performance. Students engaged in arts learning have higher GPAs, standardized test scores, and college-going rates as well as lower drop-out rates. These academic benefitsare reaped by students regardless of socio-economic status. Yet, the Departmentof Education reports that access to arts education for students of color issignificantly lower than for their white peers. 91 percent ofAmericans believe that arts are part of a well-rounded K-12education.

4. Arts strengthen the economy. Theproduction of allarts and cultural goods in the U.S. (e.g., nonprofit, commercial, education) added$804 billion to the economy in 2016, including a $25 billion internationaltrade surplus—a larger share of the nation’s economy (4.3 percent) thantransportation, tourism, and agriculture (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis). The nonprofit arts industryalone generates $166.3 billion in economic activity annually—spendingby organizations and their audiences—which supports 4.6 million jobs andgenerates $27.5 billion in government revenue.

5. Arts drive tourism and revenue to local businesses. Attendees at nonprofit arts events spend$31.47 per person, per event, beyond the cost of admission on items such asmeals, parking, and babysitters—valuable commerce for local businesses. 34 percent of attendees live outside the county in which the arts event takesplace; they average $47.57 in event-related spending. Arts travelers are idealtourists, staying longer and spending more to seek out authentic cultural experiences.

6. Arts spark creativity and innovation. Creativity is among the top 5 applied skills sought by business leaders, perthe Conference Board’s Readyto Innovate report—with72 percent saying creativity is of high importance when hiring. Research oncreativity shows that Nobel laureates in the sciences are 17 times more likelyto be actively engaged in the arts than other scientists.

7. Arts drive the creative industries.The Creative Industries are arts businesses that range from nonprofit museums,symphonies, and theaters to for-profit film, architecture, and designcompanies. A 2017 analysis of Dun & Bradstreet data counts 673,656businesses in the U.S. involved in the creation or distribution of thearts—4.01 percent of all businesses and 2.04 percent of all employees. (Get afree local Creative Industry report for your community here.)

8. Arts have social impact. University of Pennsylvania researchershave demonstrated that a high concentration of the arts in a city leads tohigher civic engagement, more social cohesion, higher child welfare, and lowerpoverty rates.

9. Arts improve healthcare. Nearlyone-half of the nation’s healthcare institutions provide arts programming forpatients, families, and even staff. 78 percent deliver these programs becauseof their healing benefits to patients—shorter hospital stays, better painmanagement, and less medication.

10. Arts for the health andwell-being of our military. The arts heal the mental, physical, and moralinjuries of war for military servicemembers and Veterans, who rank the creativearts therapies in the top 4 (out of 40) interventions and treatments. Acrossthe military continuum, the arts promote resilience during pre-deployment,deployment, and the reintegration of military servicemembers, Veterans, theirfamilies, and caregivers into communities.

 

二、反对资助：

Should  Government Fund "the Arts"?  No more than they should fundworship.

 

Editor's Note:This originally appeared at the website of The Economist on August 29, 2012, aspart of a debate on public funding of art and culture. Readthe full exchange here. 

Last year, Sen. Harry Reid, the DemocraticParty's Senate majority leader from Nevada, attacked a self-evidentlyheartless budget proposed by the Republican Party whichtrimmed $61 billion out of annual spending of nearly $4 trillion. He complainedthat such "draconian" cuts would eliminate federal arts funding andmean the certain death of "an annual cowboy poetry festival" thatdraws "tens of thousands" of people to his home state of Nevada everyyear.

First they come for the cowboy poets, Reidseemed to be saying, next they'll come for, what, the San Francisco Mime Troupe (a grouppreviously singled out by Rocco Landesman, head of the National Endowment forthe Arts, as also threatened with elimination by budget cuts)? The barbarianswere already past the gate, Reid seemed to warn, and the slaughter of innocentcowboy poets was upon us like the Goths upon Rome.

Now that the laughter has died down—it'staken a while and was extended by revelations that Reid grossly exaggerated the number ofpeople attending his beloved high-plains hootenanny—at least two things shouldbe evident even to the most diehard supporter of public funding for "thearts."

The first is that government support ofspecific institutions or individuals is in no way necessary or sufficient forthe production of "art" (however you choose to define that gloriouslynebulous term). What more do youneed to know than the one point on which AlanDavey and Pete Spence agree: Britain—the very birthplace of Dr.Johnson and Dr. Who—didn't start using serious amountsof tax money to fund art until after the second world war. How did culture inOld Blighty ever survive so long? 

A second point is that governments everywhere are dead broke. Not just alittle light on cash until the next payday, but up to their eyeballs in hockfor generations to come. It's bad enough that future generations of Americanswill be paying off today's tab that we've run up by building bridges tonowhere, waging the war on drugs and bombing Afghan villages into the StoneAge. Should they also have to pay for cowboy poetry and mime shows that theyhopefully will never have to actually attend? It's well past time to ratchetdown government spending on everything that is not absolutely essential to thepolitical functioning of a country.

That doesn't mean art—or artists—will bestarved. In the United States,Americans spend about $150 billion a year onmovie and theatre tickets, books, MP3s and the like. Philanthropic giving by foundations andindividuals adds another $13 billion a year to that already grand sum. Maybeevery quilting bee, experimental opera and short story anthology won't befunded in a world without government subsidies, but out of such tragedies greatart might be a-born.

There's at least a third reason to stop statefunding of the arts, and it's the one I take most seriously as a literaryscholar and writer. In the 17thcentury, a great religious dissenter, Roger Williams (educated at Cambridge,exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony), wrote the first case for totalseparation of church and state in the English language. Forced worship, saidWilliams, "stinks in God's nostrils" as an affront to individualliberty and autonomy; worse still, it subjugated theology to politics.

Something similar holds true with painting,music, writing, video and all other forms of creative expression. Forcedfunding of the arts—in whatever trivial amounts and indirect ways—implicatescitizens in culture they might openly despise or blissfully ignore. And such mandatory tithing effectively turnscreators and institutions lucky enough to win momentary favour from bureaucratsinto either well-trained dogs or witting instruments of the powerful andwell-connected. Independenceworks quite well for churches and the press. It works even more wonderfully inthe arts.