Topic : Which do you prefer, watching movies or reading books? |
When my friends and I come to a situation where we have to choose one between watching movies or reading books, we often choose the former. Truth be told, I have a preference for choosing reading instead of watching movies. I think that reading books has far more advantages than those of watching movies. The advantages are the wider range of vocabulary, stimulation of one’s curiosity, and the second-hand experience. First of all, reading enables one to improve their vocabulary range. Reading books involves coming across many words. Since books often contain words that one might not be familiar with, it entails the reader’s pains to understand the meanings of the unsure words through the contexts. Hence, going through the process of comprehending and learning those unfamiliar words, many people eventually results in having a wider vocabulary. In contrast, the same thing does not happen when watching movies because people are just entertaining themselves by simply watching the movies without any intellectual desire. People cannot possibly improve their vocabulary range if they repeat the same ignoring process. Moreover, reading makes people stimulate their curiosity. Let’s assume that someone is playing a computer game. Once he starts playing, he seems to be deeply indulged in the game and cannot control himself with moderate amount of playing the game until he reaches the next level. The same thing applies to reading. Once people start reading books, a majority of the people do not want to put down their books until the books are finished. This is because one cannot pull themselves out of their reading world unless they find out what happened next. To put it more simply, the curiosity of reading books stimulates the readers to avoid the impulse of laying down their books. Last but not least, people can experience things not directly, but indirectly. This can also mean that one is able to find morals through second-hand experience. With the newly found morals, the reader can apply it to his present life or even to his future life. On the other hand, others might say that finding morals is also possible through watching movies. This is true, but movies are mainly based on entertainment, not on teaching instructive contents to people. For those reasons that reading enhances one’s linguistic skills, stirring the reader’s questioning minds, and undergoing things in a roundabout way, I definitely favor reading over watching movies. I think that reading not only has a great influence on one’s linguistic skills but also in his social life as reading gives him ample knowledge on coping with problems in the near future. Therefore, like there is a word such as a chain-smoker, I would like to be a “chain-reader”. |