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  3. Learning about the past has no value for those of us living in the present. Do you agree or disagree? Use specific reasons and e

Learning about the past has no value for those of us living in the present. Do you agree or disagree? Use specific reasons and e

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问题     Learning about the past has no value for those of us living in the present. Do you agree or disagree? Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
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答案Does history have any value for people living in tne present? People live in the present. They plan for and worry about the future. History, however, is the study of the past. Some people might ask, "Given all the demands that press in from living in the present and anticipating what is yet to come, why bother with what has been? Given all the desirable and available branches of knowledge, why insist—as most American educational programs do—on a good bit of history? And why urge many students to study even more about history than they are required to?" However, it is undeniable that learning about the past has its value, it will help us understand people and societies, and it will help us understand change and how the society we live in came to be. History helps us understand people and societies. In the first place, history offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave. Understanding the operations of people and societies is difficult, though a number of disciplines make the attempt. An exclusive reliance on current data would needlessly handicap our efforts. For example, how can we evaluate war if the nation is at peace—unless we use historical materials? How can we understand genius, the influence of technological innovation, or the role that beliefs play in shaping family life, if we do not use what we know about experiences in the past? Consequently, history must serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory, and data from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings. This, fundamentally, is why we cannot stay away from history: it offers the only extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives. History also helps us understand change and how the society we live in came to be. The second reason history is inescapable as a subject of serious study follows closely on the first. The past causes the present and the future. Any time we try to know why something happened—whether a shift in political party dominance in the American Congress, a major change in the teenage suicide rate, or a war in the Balkans or the Middle East—we have to look for factors that took shape earlier. Sometimes, fairly recent history will suffice to explain a major development, but we often need to look further back to identify the causes of change. Only through studying history can we grasp how things change; only through history can we begin to comprehend the factors that cause change; and only through history can we understand what elements of an institution or a society persist despite change.
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