essay - TOEFL4

Question:
It has been said, "Not everything that is learned is contained in books." Compare and contrast knowledge gained from experience with knowledge gained from books. In your opinion, which source is more important? Why?

Answer:
Needless to say, both of theory and practice are necessary to make a progress on human beings. Only theory makes nonsense, and only practice cannot make advance. So, in a proper fashion, people need to weave both theory and practice at the time they learn something they want to master. But in face of this question, I must answer that experience is much more important than knowledge from books.

The first reason why I think so is that experience stems from one's own characteristic. Experience from the person's deep emotion is quite valuable for the person's growth. For instance, I can learn about love from book, but the time I truly recognize love is when I feel love with someone actually. So, experience can teach people what we cannot get from books.

The second reason why I think experience is more important than books is that experience can bring significant images to the person taking the experience. Of course, books can also bring the same kind of stimulation to the person reading the book, but the magnitude is pretty much different. For instance, touching fire or drowning in the sea bring a real sense to the man, whereas knowledge from books brings a little stimulation to the man.

Knowledge from books, however, promote significant merits to people. People can learn what they cannot experience only by themselves. People can learn some framework or theory that many scholars have studied for many years. So, as I mentioned earlier, people need to weave both of them at a proper timing and in a proper manner. That's a key point to make a big advance on the life.

In summary, experience from actual lives bring remarkable advantages to people. I think that the most important thing is to weave both of experience and theory from book, but I'd like to insist that experience is much more precious than knowledge from books because of the uniqueness and the reality. Those make experience pretty much precious for human beings.