C2 : Essay Writing

I'm Belina holding my ECCE certificate.

My favourite dance group is Quest Crew.

I love dancing.

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Essay Themes

1.  A visit to a place
2.  The punishment should fit the crime
3.  The world is a very dangerous place to live in nowadays
4. World governments should conduct serious campaigns   against smoking
5.  Capital Punishment: Pro or Against
6.  Do children enjoy too much freedom?
7.  The price we are paying for progress
8.  Women's rights
9.  Euthanasia

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1.  A visit to a place


We had heard that a new ski centre had opened up at Yerovracho on the south west slopes of Mt. Parnassos, so we decided to go and have a look at it.
The first stage of the route was more than familiar, a dull seventy-kilometre stretch of motorway followed by the somewhat more attractive stretch of road between Thebes and Livadia. Though still on familiar ground, we now began the steady winding climb, dip and climb that leads up through the increasingly rugged but imposing terrain before Arachova; but now the peaks of which would now and then appear fleetingly through the veiling clouds, loomed up in front and sent butterflies fluttering through our stomachs at the realisation that somewhere up there was our destination.

Vocabulary analysis

1. stretch: a large or continuous expanse or distance e.g. a stretch of water
2. winding: a curving or sinuous course (full of laps) or movement
3. rugged: having an uneven or jagged surface
4. imposing: grand or impressive
5. terrain: ground or a piece of ground
6. peaks: a pointed end, summit of a mountain
7. fleeting: rapid and transient
8. veiling: veil (fabric)
9. fluttering: to wave, to flap the wings
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2.  The punishment should fit the crime

This expression appears to represent a natural human demand but it raises the question of how literally we should interpret it, In some Muslim countries, for example, thieves are punished by having their hands cut off. Even if everyone accepted this sort of appropriate punishment for crime, it would not be easy to find a suitable way of dealing with every sort of offence.
People likely to favour this statement are probably those who have been brought up with a strict sense of right and wrong, and believe everyone else should share it. Essentially, they consider that everyone is responsible for his own actions and must pay for the consequences. They base their attitudes on the Old Testament motto: “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” This motto can represent an idea of natural justice, of course, but it can also be an excuse for revenge.
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3.  The world is a very dangerous place to live in nowadays


History books will verify that the world has always been fraught with danger whether in the form of war, tyrant or natural disaster. Only the dates, places and names have changed. In the same way that a mother, in the Stone Age must have warned her child to beware of animals when going out to play so mothers today tell their children to mind the roads.
Centuries ago England was attacked by Vikings who raped and pillaged the land. The Chinese suffered torture at the hands of the war lords, Greece was overrun by the Turks and the Greeks lived in fear. Earthquakes and floods too have terrorised whole populations. The mad man who runs amok and guns down a queue of people at the supermarket is no more dangerous than John Dillinger and his mob in the 1930s opening fire on restaurants and shooting the diners, one of whom upset him in some way.

Vocabulary analysis

1. verify : to prove to be true; confirm
2. fraught: filled or charged
3. raped: to plunder or despoil a place in war
4. pillaged: to rob (a town, village, etc.)
5. torture: to cause extreme physical pain to
6. overrun: to attack or invade and defeat conclusively
7. run amok: to run about with or as with a frenzied desire to kill
8. gun down: to shoot
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4.  World governments should conduct serious campaigns against smoking

If you smoke and you still don't believe that there's a definite link between smoking and bronchial troubles, heart disease and lung cancer, then you are certainly deceiving yourself. No one will accuse you of hypocricy. Let us just say that you are suffering from a bad case of wishful thinking.
This needn't make you too uncomfortable because you are in good company. Whenever the subject of smoking and health is raised, the governments of most countries hear no evil, see no evil and smell no evil. Admittedly, a few goverments have taken timid measures. In Britain, for instance, cigarette advertising has been banned on television. The conscience of the nation is appeased, while the population continues to puff its way to smoky, cancerous death.
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I'm Anna. This is me going to Athens 

on a train with a rose in my mouth. 
I've just had some good news

that's why I look so happy!

5.  Capital Punishment : Pro or Against

But it is not the severity of the law enough? Will a would-be criminal ever recollect his reward, however hard it may be, before committing a crime> I think not, and not without good reason crime is always connected with prevailing social conditions. By these I mean poverty and unemployment. Social and economic unjustice often account for a crime commital.



Is it right to deprive the life of a man who has taken away the life of another’s? Some people think that the man who commits such a cruel act deserves the ultimate punishment. Regardless of the motives, the reason which instigated him to such an art, there should be no justification for that sort of criminal and the law must be merciless. They are sure the capital penalty will act as a deterrent for an imminent murderer and thus their numbers be reduced.
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6.  Do children enjoy too much freedom?


To say that children enjoy too much freedom suggests the converse: that today’s parents have too little control over their offsprings. Anyone of middle age and over might feel tempted to agree, for he will remember his own childhood and upbringing when the traditional autocratic principles of child-raising still prevailed. In those days a father’s word was still law for his wife and children who played submissive roles within the family. The established idea was that children should be seen but not heard. They were to do as they were told. They were inferior beings and as such had no rights, only obligations and duties.


However, with the spread of democratic ideals in the last fifty or sixty years, new egalitarian principles have left their mark on family life as well as society at large. Children have come to be seen as individuals with equal rights. Moreover, with the development of psychology and the social sciences a new look has been taken at children. At the same time in the new nuclear family young parents have had to face the problems and responsibility of child-raising on their own without the support of experienced relatives. Thus in a child-conscious society overconscientious parents trusted blindly in the new gospel of the child psychologists, pediatricians and pedagogues, in the Dreikurses, Spocks and Neils, without really understanding them.


Vocabulary analysis
1. converse: contrary
2. offspring: children
3. autocratic: despotic
4. prevail: predominate
5. egalitarian: considerate of humankind

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The price we are paying for progress


Life today, judged by the standards of the past should be more than worth living. In every sphere of life so much progress has been made. Never before have men enjoyed so fully the so-called basic rights which they have always claimed as their own. Democracies flourish, men and women can at last be said to live more or less on equal terms, enjoying free education, decent working conditions and free medical treatment. Indeed disease and illness lost their fear and we may even expect to live longer than even our immediate ancestors. The industrial and technological revolutions, with the miraculous micro-chip its latest achievement, have simplified and speeded up work and at the same time opened up new worlds, thanks to modern forms of transport and the mass media. As the Conservative Party slogan used to put it, ‘we have never had it so good!’

And yet as the saying goes, there is a fly or two or three in the ointment. Our world is far from being the paradise it should be. The march of progress has not been without its sacrifices. Indeed it has left us with unprecedented problems which have taken the promised joy out of our lives. For the first time in human history man has reason to fear for the future of his race. He has developed nuclear weapons which, if used, could wipe out every trace of man from this earth and perhaps the earth itself.
Vocabulary analysis

1. flourish: to thrive; prosper
2. ointment: a fatty or oily medicated preparation applied to the skin to heal or protect
3. unprecedented: unparalleled
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Women’s rights

Only a month ago a general plebiscite in Switzerland decided in favour of granting Swiss women the right to vote. That such political recognition should come so late in a country by no means backward is a reminder that the women of the world are still an underpriviliged class. Nor is the suffering now accepted as a panacea for all women’s sufferings at the hands of man. It is true that the fair sex have established themselves in all the top professions, competing on equal terms with men as scientists, doctors, lawyers, judges and teachers, India and Israel are at present governed by women prime ministers, and other women play active political roles all over the world. Even on a lower level we often read of women venturing into the more exclusively male fields of flying aeroplanes, sailing ships, and even driving buses and taxis. A woman has flown in space. Women have always laboured next to men in fields and now do so on building sites. And in war it is no longer uncommon to find women fighting beside men in the thick of battle. It already seems to be accepted that anything John can do Mary can do as well if not better. With one exception it should be noted: the field of arts where with the exception of one or two gifted writers, the Jane Austens and the George Elliots, women have never achieved genius. Where are your women artists, your women composers?
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Euthanasia 


There has been “enlightened” opinion lately, arguing that doctors should be empowered to end the lives of those who suffer from incurable diseases. These arguments are ridiculous, as this essay will try to prove.

In the power to end any person’s life is given to anyone by the laws of a country, who will be the person to define the border line of a benevolent action and a crime? What assurance may the State have that doctors will not make bad use of that power over people, and will not act for their own interests or for revenge or for any other reason at all? Who will protect crippled rich patients without families, who have been in private clinics for years, from becoming the easy prey of ravenous for wealth doctors? Luckily there are no doubts among the legislators about the naivety of the patients themselves to accept death. Death cannot be administered by any doctor on the basis of a certain diagnosis, which may prove to have been erroneous.

From time to time a piece of news appears in the papers to inform the public that a pair of surgical scissors has been left in a patient’s stomach  by the gross carelessness of a surgeon; or that a certain patient would have been saved, if his doctor had been located at the place where he was supposed to be available. Wrong diagnoses are as frequent as sunrise and sunsets. Doctors are human beings after all, and human nature is flawed.


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