Hey, I just took a full-leghth SAT practice test yesterday and I just need to score this essay to get my complete score. Can someone score it please ? Here is the prompt : “Does curiosity help or harm? Discuss the role of curisoity in human life, drawing upon history, literature, current events, or your own experience and observations”
Curiosity is often considered as being one of human beings' main flaws; it is also said that it may lead us to our own end. However, despite the fact that I consider curiosity as an ambiguous characteristic, I stlightly bend towards one answer : curiosity is the first step leading to progress, and is hence necessary to ou species' development, without doing any harm whatsoever.
Scientists are very famliar with one way to think and innove : first, write a hypothesis, imagine an experience, observe and analyze the results so as to confronte them with your hypothesis. Without curiosity, how would any scientist manage to discover something that could be a major step toward humanity's progress ? Had Archimedes never been curious about the reason the volume of his bath was increasing, we would miss an essential rule in physics. Had Newton never been curious about the reason his apple had fallen, the word gravity would't even be in our dictionaries. Being curious is paying attention to the world surrounding you, and thus asking yourself questions, innovating: all of it can only do us, humans, good.
We have all read the fairy tale "Bluebeard" as children, where a woman marries a man who forbids her to enter in one single room. Nonetheless, once he is gone, the woman cannot help but enter the prohibited room, out of pure curiosity. There, she finds the corpses of all Bluebeard's previous women. One her husband finds out abour her treachery, she is doomed to know the same faith as the previous women. However, her brother comes and eventually rescues her. This is yet another example of how curiosity benefits humans. By entering the forbidden room out of curiosity, she found out about her husband's true nature. Imagine if she had never done so: the woman would have unkowingly lived her entire life with a monster whose main activity is murdering innocent women, and stacking them in a room. Thus, the woman's succubing to her curiosity delivered her from a somber life she could have lived.
In conclusion, curiosity can be humans' biggest and most effective asset; the tool that has permitted us to get to the place where we are now. Don't philosophers say that the difference between animals and us lies within our conscience ? Then perhaps curiosity is how our conscience expresses itself, allowing us to go beyond our boundaries and expand our horizons.
Thank you!!