Monthly TOEFL Essay #2

Hardly can you imagine this world changing. Everything would seem to be so “of course”. However, life is always a change and we will face another change soon. Then, what would be some changes that will occur in 21st century? In my opinion, common marriage custom of marrying one person in a lifetime would change to marrying more than one person as your will; need and willing of the people to study and learn delicate skills would be more intensified.

To start with, marrying more than one person in the lifetime would be expected as common custom instead of marrying only one person. In modern society, majority of the cultures have custom of marrying one person in one life. Unless the partner has died or they have trouble with the partner’s relationship, majority of the people maintain their relationships with the partner for their entire life. However, as medicine technology develops, I think by the end of the 21^st century, people will be able to live for more than 100 years. I think, as now, living for average 70 years and living with one partner for about 40 years is quiet fair. But if the life span is extended, living with one partner for more than 70 years might be quiet boring. Just the marriage customs have changes from the ancient times when people marry at a very young age to now that people marry later and later, I suspect that maybe marrying custom would again gradually change to those that allow and permit more than one marriage in life. Furthermore, I imagine that this kind of custom would be regulated as laws to prevent many fundamental troublesome relationships in the family units. More specifically, there would be trials or choices between the couple once in 30 or 40 years to “live or leave”. This kind of regulations and customs would allow much more free relationship between married couple but also might bring side effects of viewing the relationship as something so easy.

Secondly, there would be only jobs that require delicate skills of the human such as artists, professors. Nowadays, there are some jobs that don’t require people to have high degree of knowledge or skills. Uneducated people can use their labor to earn money. However in the future, those labor forces that require less delicate skills such as clerk, factory-worker, street cleaner, secretaries with simple works will entirely be replaced by the robots or computers. Then, with these cheap and meticulous forces, human will only have the leftover jobs that are limited to only human ability. For example, the artists who express human emotions, studies dealing with humanities, languages which cannot be simply stated and studied cannot be substituted by those computer forces. So, imagining the future view, I think I would see only artists, musicians, doctors, humanity professors, psychologists, engineers who have control over the robot forces etc. If this change occurs, people would have to work harder to find a way to get those jobs, and they have to work harder to do so. To be more specific, the rate of university attendance might raised to higher than 90%, and the competition for the job will be much more severe since there will be so many highly educated people. Meanwhile, those who are unfortunately uneducated or not provided with such artistic gifts might fall into deep frustration that they would not be able to go on in that competition with the other people and the robots.

In conclusion, I suspect that there would be two major changes in this upcoming 100 years. Marrying more than one person in a life would be common marriage custom and only jobs that require high skills, knowledge or artistic gifts would be left over for the human and thus people would have to work harder to survive. These changes may seem to be little awkward and unreasonable now. But who in 1900s would have suspected lives like this? Life always changes and no one knows that this really can be the future by 2100.

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