2012年3月23日托福独立写作真题附参考范文

Environmental protection and economic development are both vital to a nation. But when it comes to the issue whether environment protection should receive more financial support from the government than economic development, my answer is positive. First, environmental protection needs more money than economic development. The reasons are twofold. For one thing, governments have to raise huge amount of money to purchase tree seeds or saplings and hire more people toafforestate the land. Besides, maintaining a big area of forest is quite costly. For another thing, governments are responsible to spend much money on encouraging the inventions of renewable energy, which may completely replace the fossil fuels and contribute greatly to the environmental protection. More inventions mean that the government has to invest more on scientific research, such as investing more on the university laboratories and paying the scientists. Those are commonly huge costs for a government. In contrast, economic development does not need such large amount of money.What the government should do is to continuously carry out policies that can really help boost the whole economy and supervise and guide every individual economic participant. These will be some tasks that require less money. Second, it is the government that has to pay more money to protect our environment, because government acquisition of goods and services intended to create future benefits. Environment protection exerts long-term influences upon human beings and economic development. For example, protecting forests means we can have better air condition and more lumber supply in the future; protecting lakes and oceans means we can have cleaner water and more seafood. Both lumbers and water are crucial to the modern industry. However, it is barely possible for an individual investor to donate enough his income or savings to protect natural environment and consider the long-term merits instead of their own short-term payback. Admittedly, economic development does need money. It is because investment has been widely considered as a main stimulation of regional economy. That happens repeatedly in the emerging market economy. Once an investment reaches a small open economy, the country may quickly thrive. However, those funding should mainly come from individual investors or big companies. Governments are not supposed to fill this role. As far as I am concerned, a government should focus its budgets more on environmental protection rather than economic development.