Essay by 謝振禮老師 Jeenn Lee Hsieh

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真題還原

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? “Patience is usually not a good strategy, so we (people) should take action now rather than later”. Use reasons and specific examples to support your answer.

范文:

Patience is either a good strategy of waiting and hoping, or a bad one of losing time and opportunities. Under different circumstances, more often than not we should wait and hope in order to achieve, but sometimes it is better for us to act immediately before "golden" opportunities are lost forever. At best, patience is wisdom; and at worst, it is laziness in the abscence of courage.

Being a great capacity associated with wisdom, patience usually a good strategy. Since most great achievements require time, patience may be regarded as a form of wisdom which is essential to successfully managing many things, big and small. Generally speaking, that wisdom is summed up in two words: wait and hope. Like farmers, for instance, we need to learn that we cannot sow and reap the same day, and that we should keep things going with hope, particularly when the going is hard and slow. Also in social life, without patience we at heart cannot work together efficiently with other people and society cannot function at all in civil order. To paraphrase the wisdom of an old Chinese saying : "lack of patience in small matters can create havoc in great ones".

Nevertheless, patience has its limits; being taken too far, it goes beyond laziness to become cowardice. Hence, it is not always realistic to believe that all good things in the world come to us just because we wait long enough, refusing to know what on earth we are hoping for. Indeed, patience must be founded on realistic hope and it is not a virtue, provided that it is not out of necessity. That is to say, patience may become a bad strategy if it is passive, which means not taking right action in the right place at the right moment. Ironically, patience ought to be understood as the quality of being active, or a form of action, which demands courage and force so that time is not hopelessly lost. Far from being lazy and cowardly, we should not hesitate imprudently and wait passively but should rather take quick action in the right direction now rather than later, considering that "time and tide" shall wait for no lazy people.

Accordingly, the wise policy is to seek patience and action in equal amounts. Patience alone without wisdom does not lead to great achievements, whereas hasty actions are seldom wise and often doomed. We may believe that laziness along with cowardice is a bad strategy, and we should also know that the wisdom of patience is doing something else in the meantime and not waiting foolishly like cowards.