The Importance of the Ability to Cooporate

Topic:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?

The ability to cooperate well with others is more important today than in the past.

Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

SAMPLE ESSAY

Nowadays, I see large numbers of people getting by without cooperating with anyone else. This observation leads me to believe that the ability to cooperate well with others was much more important in the past than it is in the present.

In the past, the lack of conveniences meant people always had to get along well with others. Today, if we need some clothes, we go out and buy them. But this used to be impossible. A long time ago, people focused on just one skill. It may have been farming, soldiering, blacksmithing, or whatever. So people depended on every member of society to get the food, protection, and tools they needed. A perfect example is the settlers who left Europe to colonize America. They could never have survived by working alone. By working together, however, they could finally build an amazingly successful country. Not cooperating would have resulted in a very different, worse-off country.

Also, since a huge majority of people were once involved in agriculture, cooperation was essential to their survival. At that time, one person would have had great difficulty farming the land to provide enough food for himself. Therefore, families had to work together to produce enough food to eat, and this is why families often used to be very large. They needed as many people as possible to work the land. My grandfather was one of ten children. They all helped farm when they were old enough. However, today we are living in an information age, and life is much more individualized. The need for cooperation has greatly decreased compared with the agricultural age.

Cooperating with others was far more important in the past than today. People needed others’ help to get various products they needed. They also had to work together to get enough food. They would have had a hard time surviving in the past if they had not worked well with each other.

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