<p>Can someone please grade this practice SAT essay? I want to see where I am before I begin studying for my January SAT - to know where I need the most help. Thanks! </p>
<p>Passage: A mistakenly cynical view of human behavior holds that people are primarly drive by selfish motives: the desire for wealth, for power, or for fame. Yet history gives us many examples of individuals who have sacrificed their own welfare for a cause or a principle that they regarded as more important than their own lives. Conscience - that powerful inner voice that tells us what is right and what is wrong - can be a more compelling force than money, power, or fame.</p>
<p>Assignment: Is conscience a more powerful motivator than money, fame, or power? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations. </p>
<p>Essay:</p>
<pre><code> Conscience -that little voice inside your head that tells you whats right or wrong. How many times have you actually ever listened to your conscience telling you the right thing to do? In my case, rarely. But somehow, I dont think of myself as a bad person. There are just other motivators that stimulate my choices money, power, and fame. No matter how much we, as humans, may fool ourselves into thinking we are good people who make conscientious decisions, there are always hidden motivators, such as money, power, and fame that activate human primal instincts, namely survival of the fittest.
Survival of the fittest entails us to be better than others, to get what we want. From this stems one of mans most negative traits, greed. As down-putting as this may seem, it is the truth. Man wants all, and will do a lot to gain the superior respect and wealth that we so desire in this modern-day world. Putting it into perspective, we live in a world deemed by a social ladder of wealth, power, and fame. The rich and famous, namely celebrities, have more than the average human, and being at the bottom of that pile entails the ordinary to look up and strive to be up there with the others who have everything.
And even if you have realized the impossible, for many, dream of becoming one of the famous, you still strive to work to a higher level, even on a smaller scale. Take for example, a job. As soon as you graduate you may intern for a company, then work your way to a normal employee, then to a boss, and maybe, if youre lucky, a CEO or head of a company. But why? Because our conscience is motivating us to work to a better spot in a company to provide better for the greater public? In most cases, no. The lure of the larger paychecks, and the higher superiority and respect, stimulate your drive to the top.
The modern world, full of its materialistic views and bribes conform us to a mindset of that sort. Nature vs. Nurture both have an impact. We are born to do what we can to survive and triumph over others, and this modern environment enriches our perspective into a materialistic viewpoint. As human beings, our natural instincts prime us to live superiorly and adding money, power, or fame into the equation pushes us more than our own moral conscious does. Of course not everyone is a ladder climbing, superiority obsessed person. There are people in this world who really do sacrifice themselves for others well-being. But until the majority of us learn to live morally and conscientiously, our modern world will continue to coax us through the use of larger sums of money, more power, and more fame some of the most powerful motivators of all.
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