▶ Your Answer :
People who we
meet and who we choose to meet matters a lot, as it affects our life as well as
our way of thinking. In this regard, spending time with few close friends or
mingle with lots of friends could be a controversial matter. If I were asked to
choose between two options, I would choose it is more beneficial to meet many
friends and spend time together. There are several reasons as follows.
To begin with, when
we meet many friends, we can have chance to broaden our perspectives. Spending
time with them exposes us to different lifestyles, customs and cultures. Such
exposure is likely to help us to acknowledge that there are different values
and ultimately comfortable with it by understanding its(their) diversity. For
example, when I was in middle school, I saw one of our classmates from India
eating his meal with bare hands. I felt it quite uncomfortable at that time and
started to keep distance from him. However, after spending few weeks with some
of other foreign friends from other country in the soccer club, I got used to
this cultural difference. I realized that we just had different eating styles
but had a lot in common in a way that we all care about our family and friends.
I no longer felt awkward with them any more and since then, we still keep in touch.
Second, spending
time with few close friends could form a lopsided view as they are likely to
convey biased information. People have their own personal views, beliefs and values.
When their personal thoughts are delivered to others, it is likely to form a
skewed idea. For example, Oxford university found a huge difference between two
groups of young adults in their understanding of the refugee policy. One group
is consisted of those who interact with few of their friends and the other
group was made up of those who meet a lot of friends. The former was more
likely to have a lower level of accuracy in understanding the refugee policy
than the latter. In particular, many of the first group had an extreme one-sided
feeling about the refugees, while most of the second group acknowledged both the
bright and dark side of the issue. This implies that people are not likely to
get a balanced perspective to the issues they are dealing with by interacting
with few of their friends.
To sum up, I
believe it is a lot valuable to mingle with a lot of friends than just
interacting with few close friends for the reasons I mentioned above. Spending
time with many different friends from diverse background should not be overlooked.
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