TOEFL TWE topic 1

It has been said, "Not everything that is learnd 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?

Practice of Conjunctions and Transitional Words

Why do people who read novels have better language skills? I think that the answer to this question is easy to understand. Being in the habit of reading exposes us to new words every day. ______ reading, we not only learn new word, but we also review many others. Reading novels is interesting and educational, and we often share what we learn from the with our friends and family. ______ we discuss what we read with them, we understand the story and the words in the novels better, too. Is there an easier way to learn new vocabulary? I doubt it. _______ the reading of novels, people can enjoy their lives and improve their language skills.

...........................................................................

Many of my friends tell me that I should buy a car. Presently, I take public transportation, like the bus, the MRT, and taxis. _________, my friends tell me that I should buy a car. __________, I can see their point of view. If I had my own car, I would be free to go whereever and whenever I wanted. I would not have to wait any longer for a bus, MRT train, or a taxi. _________, I save a lot of money by taking public transportation. A car needs gas and oil, and you have to pay for your license, parking fees, and car checkups. Cars can also be inconvenient. Have you ever heard of a traffic jam? There is no traffic jam on the MRT. _______, I think I will continure to take public transportation.

Sample of Topic Sentence

My mother is neither tall nor heavy, but she is the biggest person in my life. There has been no other person with a greater influence on me. Most mothers feed, wash,, and clothe their children, and my mother is no exception. But more than this, she made sure that I received the finest education possible. This education was not at expensive schools or famous universities, but at home, by her knee, patiently. My mother explained to me the difference between right and wrong; the virtues of generosity, honesty, and hard work; and the importance of family and social ties. From her I understood who I was, where I belonged, and how I should spend my energies. No matter how big I might grow to be, I hope to be as great as my mother.

Person of the Year 2007

Person of the Year: You
Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.


TIME
December 16, 2006


By LEV GROSSMAN


(From the December 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine) -- The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the bomb, and the president of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos -- those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms -- than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

America loves its solitary geniuses -- its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses -- but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious.

連結教學

PS:圖片看不清楚，滑鼠可以點一下放大
1.登入到blog ->選擇"範本"->修改目前的




2.找到link 這一段語法...
在 ul 和 /ul之間，輸入以下格式

3.修改完成後，選擇"儲存範本變更"
4.在選擇"重新發佈"，這樣就大功告成了

If One Day You Win A Lottery...

Think about what you wat to do with the money if you win a "one-million-dollar" lottery.

Change of the Assignments

My dear students:

I am really sorry that I could not fulfill the schedule that we set for this week due to my sore throat. Please note that 11/28's assignment will be moved to 12/05, and the original 12/05's assignment will be deleted. What you need to do for this week's assignment is to read the article on pp. 121-122 and answer the comprehension questons that follow the article. Please post your answers on your blog. We will discuss the article and the questions next week. See you!

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句子與句子之間要空一格

My dear students:

Just a reminder. Please leave a single-space between two sentences. Most of you do not follow this formal rule in writing. When you revise your assigments, do not forget to revise this mechanic part.


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Finalize Your Assignment 1

My dear students:

First of all, I want to say sorry that I could not meet you face-to-face today due to my illness. Hope you were all doing well and enjoyed your unexpected break this afternoon.

Thanks to the Internet, I can still communicate with your through our "Composition Class Blog". As you can see, when you access to my teaching website (http://home.kimo.com.tw/pingyard), you can find out there is a new link (http://www.ntust06.blogspot.com) which is entittled "Discussion for Your Assignments". This new blog will be used to post your assignments after I have read and given comments on them. For you to be familiar to the way I comment on your assignments, I need to explain my "color coding system". Basically, there are four colors that I would use to highlight and comment on your artices: red, green, blue, and purple. I use color red to indicate that there are word-level errors in your sentences. Color red also point you to your mechanic errors like grammar, spelling, punctuation, and proofreading. I use color green to indicate there are phrasal or sentence-level errors in your articles and I use color blue to indicate there are beyond sentence-level errors which we call discoursal errors. I use color purple to make overall comments on your articles. In the following, I will summarize what I just said in a listing way.

Red: word-level and mechanic erros
Green: phrasal or sentence-level erros
Blue: Errors beyond sentence-level (discoursal errors)
Purple: The overall comments on your article

You can start to finalize your Assignment 1 by considering the comments that your peers and I have given. Hope the explanation in the above is clear enough to carry out the work.

Take care and see you next week!!


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