<p>I took the Oct 2013 test and got a 8 on my essay, which I think destroyed my writing score since I did super well on the MC. I'm practicing and I need some good input. Please put a number!</p>
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<p>Prompt: Is the world changing for the better?</p>
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<p>With advanced technology and great medical improvements, it may be easy to make the claim of a better world and a better society. However, if one looks deeply enough, he will see that it is precisely these types of advances, improvements, and changes that negatively influence our present and future societies. Not only are these changes degrading us, but are misleading and deceiving us as well.</p>
<p>Even before the world entered into the Common Era (CE), many philosophers and thinkers have commented on the dangers of giving into a sedentary, luxurious life. As a result of a quickly changing society where technology is making work nearly effortless, it is easy to become susceptible to this very type of lifestyle in which we have been warned of. Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, based his whole doctrine upon this principle: that human nature has a tendency towards desire (a major one being contentment and rest), and should this desire be obtained (in which, in our society, it constantly is), suffering will not cease to perpetually ensue. With the Internet easily at our fingertips and our typical lifestyle consisting of couch-surfing and playing video games, it is not difficult to see the future in which will consist of lazy, talentless, and (with regards to worldly involvement) people.</p>
<p>Literature has also had its say on the changing world. American Transcendentalists in the 19th century prominently have made it clear that in a world marked with increasing technology and economy (the American Industrial Revolution having just occurred decades before and the Southern economy's dependence on slave labor in correspondence with the new technological innovations advocating it such as Eli Whitney's cotton gin), people must remember to stay true to their loving God as well as nature. In the Second Great Awakening, authors such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson were relentless in reminding the masses of their roots and, in Thoreau's book /Walden/ in which he wrote during his study and life living in the wilderness, nature, the opposite of technology, was constantly glorified and presented as the "true" force of goodness and well-being. Thoreau and Emerson's attempt to praise nature and God were attempts to end the grand dependency on technology America was entering into.</p>
<p>Throughout history, changes have contributed very well to the world's present state. However, many changes, such as that of technology, were very deceptive in their prefaces. Despite being useful and helpful and first, its growing significance in the world has made it become a permanent epidemic--that it has lead to innumerous deaths and mistreatment as well as human despondency. Changes may seem beneficial, but often there is an underlying story that proves it is not so.</p>
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<p>Thanks for reading. I wrote a LOT, took up the whole 2 pages. I'm kind of ambivalent about it...</p>