托福独立写作范文 The government must make choices about ……
- 2018年05月04日17:55 来源：小站整理
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The government must make choices about how to spend its money on amusing the people.given the choice between spending tax dollars on art or sports，it should choose to spend those dollars on art.
In the first place, investing in art is lasting, but sports games are fleeting. If the government pays an artist, their sculpture or painting might last for millennia; however, if the government spends money on a soccer match, as soon as the match is finished, the investment is almost valueless. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Pope, various regents and princes were patrons for some of the most famous still extant works of art. They may also have invested in a fencing match or jousting competition, but who remembers that today?
In the second place, the arts help to foster high culture whereas the scrimmages and matches of the sports arena are low culture, at best. The cerebral work of creating a watercolor or oil, of displaying or critiquing such works is the very essence of the sophisticated activity of high culture. On the other hand, rolling around on the wrestling mat, pulling each other's ears in a rugby scrum, or causing brain damage on the football field are just a step away from the simian culture of the caveman.
Finally, if the government invests in sports, they might be said merely to be feeding the masses to keep them content, but art can be controversial and so is not just a pacifier, but an instigator of involvement in society. The government should want to invest its dollars in getting its citizens engaged in society. Shakespeare's plays are a form of art that have endured for nearly five-hundred years as the penultimate expressions of Western storytelling and writing craft. Like sporting matches, they were produced and watched, in part, as a way of pleasing the masses, but their value did not stop there. In fact, his plays still raise relevant social questions for scholars and theatre-goers around the world. The same cannot be said of Irish football!
We can clearly see that governments should value the arts over sports, because of their enduring contributions to high culture and ability to spur discussion and participation in society, which are attributes that sporting events lack.
