GRE写作素材Section Three: Ideas_GRE写作

GRE写作素材Section Three: Ideas

　　Practice tolerance

　　Having opinions about issues is natural. When you stop having opinions, you re probably not breathing anymore. The problem comes when we hold opinions in a way that leads to defensiveness put-down, or put-offs.

　　Going hand in hand with critical thinking is tolerance for attitudes that differ from yours. Consider that many of the ideas we currently accept democracy, Christianity, voting rights for women, civil rights for people of color were once considered the claims of dangerous and unpopular minorities. This historical perspective helps us accept a tenet of critical thinking: What seems outlandish today may become widely accepted a century, a decade, or even a year from now.

　　Understand before criticizing

　　When encountering any new viewpoint, we re obligated to agree. Even so, critical thinking demands that we take the time to understand an idea before rejecting or modifying it. One mark of skilled debaters is that they can sum up the viewpoints they disagree with often better than the people who hold those viewpoints can.

　　Strictly speaking, none of us lives in the same world. Our habits, preferences, outlooks, and values are as individual as our fingerprints. Each of them is shaped by our culture, our upbringing, our experiences, and our choices. Speeches, books, articles, works of art, television programs, views expressed in conversation all come from people who inhabit a different world than yours. Until we re lived in another person s world for a while, it s ineffective to dismiss her point of view.