GRE写作优秀范文：少数和多数之发表意见

　　The media—and society in general—mistakenly expect an individual to speak for a particular group, whether or not that individual truly represents the views of the entire group.

　　媒体和整个社会错误地希望某个人的发言就是代表了某一个特定的群体，无论这个个人是否代表了整个群体的意见。

　　With the deepening of social division, an individual, as asserted by the speaker, is considered to speak for a particular group, in which he/she lives and works, regardless of the credibility of the representation of the view. I concede that it is reasonable to rely on representative opinions as an effective method to evaluate the feelings of the total group. Nevertheless, such kind of generalization from minority to the public has its limits, which may lead to false conclusion.

　　Admittedly, it is reasonable that news reporters or program moderators will resort to the method of choosing individuals to express their regards, evaluations and feelings about certain event, and hope to acquire overall views of groups or public that interviewees represent for. On the one hand, some castes do act as a signal of the social environment, which can well be put into evaluation for a generalization. Take the media itself as an example, in some counties, the television stations and newspapers there are likely to speak out what direction of development the country is going by and how it reacts to certain global issue. Hence, their media counterparts from abroad have a good reason to depend on the domestic media to draw authoritative conclusions of the whole nation. On the other hand, it is almost a ‘mission impossible’ to carry out a complete and integrated survey which contains every single possibility of diversity in attitudes concerning the cost of survey and feasibility of gathering samplings. The CCTV always carries out an annual survey about the most welcomed program it presented in the past year. Considering the 1.3 billion population of the whole country, chances is little to get feed backs from all the citizens. As a substitution, the informants are randomly selected from various provinces in order to make it as even as possible.

　　However, some social surveys are conducted in quantitative method which lacks the ability to deduce a specific outcome from a few individuals to an entire group result from the composition of the representative group. Because a certain group of people may be divided into three separate factions when confronting a controversial issue: the advocators, the opponents and the eclectics. Each one of the factions is less liable to show inclination, not to mention representations, of the other two. A case in point is the incompatible opinions among people from different walks of lives as to the cloning of human beings. A number of scientists argue for the legalization of human replication as it is a landmark of biochemistry. Meanwhile, opponent response is heard from ethnic community, where the cloning of people is considered to be as demoralization and should be banned without hesitation. However, some people are still pendulous around and don’t know which side to agree with. If a survey is only taken within one of the three groups, we would have completely conflicting results, none of which truly represents the complexity of the problem. Different from conducting a relatively precise and quantitative survey in scientific fields, which usually can calculate sampling error which may circumscribe the accuracy of sampling, social surveys have the inherited disadvantages in the credibility of deduction from the representative to the general.