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Mission_MBA
 
 

Your comments are highly soilicited, thanks!

by Mission_MBA Sun Sep 07, 2008 2:24 am

:arrow: "Only by traveling outside the country of one’s birth can one understand the world and its people."

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your views with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations or reading.
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We travel to find ourselves and to lose ourselves. And we travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world. There were days, when people had to travel to different parts of the globe to reveal how richly the life is dispersed. To our surprise those days are long gone when people had to travel physically from one country to another to have a clear understanding of another culture, another momentum of life.

Thanks to the advances in technology. People around the world can now explore the entire earth sitting glazed-eyed before their computer screen in a basement attic, bedroom or office cubicle. Cyber space, CD ROMs, newspapers, magazines, televisions - today many of us see this as a way to travel and know the world without leaving the comforts of home. There is no doubt in admitting that the flashing images on the TV screen coupled with enriched information provided by the specialists bring the world to our door-step. The popular TV channel "Travel and Livings" has a long success story. It telecasts some distant corners of the world. Sitting in the cozy corners of our houses we find ourselves in the whiff of another culture, another language and another region.

Today, people do not have to worry about the terrorist attacks every now and then. Technology has given us the opportunity of reaching a foreign land by just pressing a button on TV or a mouse click on the internet. The quick availability of information and the resulting familiarity can now fill up the gaps left by those words in the magazines and newspapers.
Internet connection has curtailed social trips to the uncertain corners of the unknown lands. Web connection created and sustained by technology serves to bring us closer. It provides space on emails, blogs and other online public forums to people to become acquainted with each other, forge friendships and keep ties that bind across vast distances which was perhaps not possible a couple of decades ago.

However, TV and Internet are not in essence romantic. You can call them image or information highways or a road offering many glimpses into our planet where we stand and stop for a moment to quickly absorb a flashing bite of information. To travel is to come down from highway on to the roads leading inwards, into the unknown nation, city, town or villages and to our own hearts. When we look at the passing images, it is like standing in the portal, one needs to walk in through the gate and explore all that is beyond.

When we travel, we see in large part - our hassles and hardship that we need to see. Travel in that sense guides us to a better balance of wisdom and compassion and ability to see and understand the world clearly and not through the selective images of luxury and poverty in TV. If we try to view and understand the world only by grainy pictures on the TV and internet, we might end having lost touch with the real things.

In conclusion, we must conform that technological developments make us familiar with the global surroundings and their people and all these global views are challenged when we step out from our home to see the universe. (Words: 547)

Please RATE!!! :(
StaceyKoprince
ManhattanGMAT Staff
 
Posts: 9350
Joined: Wed Oct 19, 2005 9:05 am
Location: Montreal
 

by StaceyKoprince Mon Sep 08, 2008 12:30 pm

Hi, thanks for posting your essays! Just an FYI that instructors don't respond to posted essays - we just have too much to do with all of the question posted and essays tend to be the thing that is least "transferable" (that is, you can learn a lot, but probably other people won't learn as much from looking at our responses to your essays, unlike the multiple choice questions).

But I certainly hope other community members respond. Also, if you're in our class, you'll have an opportunity to get essays graded and get written feedback during the course (after class 6). We also offer an essay grading service - 2 essays graded and given written feedback. If you'd like to do this, send an email to studentservices@manhattangmat.com.
Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director, Content & Curriculum
ManhattanPrep