It has been said, "Not everything that is learned is contained in books." Compare and contrast knowledge gained from experience with knowledge gained from books. In your opinion, which source is more important? Why?
Both experiences and books are very essential resources, and both of them have relevant merits.
Experiences are the most direct resources we ever have. Almost our every basic skill came from experiences, such as walking, articulating, reading even thinking. Without experiences, some natural born abilities even might lose. Studies have shown that a baby who was robbed by animals into forest for 12 years lost his ability to talk in human language. Furthermore, it is generally accepted that each and every skill develops by experiences, and that’s why people always say practice makes perfect.
Books are valuable when knowledge is beyond the scope of our experiences. Perhaps the most obvious examples are those fluent writers. They write various stories, the scopes of which are far beyond any individual’s experiences. Take Joyce Carol Oates for example, her productivity has been prodigious, accumulating in less than two decades to nearly thirty titles, including novels, collections of short stories and verse, plays and literary criticism. Although some of them appear to come from her own direct observations, her dreams, and her fears, much more is clearly from the experiences of others. Her fictive world remains strikingly akin to that real one reflected in the daily newspapers, the television news and talk shows, and the popular magazines of our day.
Yet either experiences or books may give us wrong information. Our direct observations always are subject to our beliefs, hopes, fears, expectations, and our bias, which might make observations unreliable. People vary in their powers of observation, and the reliability of our observations is no better than the reliability of our memories, which as we know can be deceptive. Information printed in papers sometimes is unreliable either, it may be misprinted, or even deliberately distorted. For example, Definitions such as Marxism, Capitalism, Zionism are totally different in the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Current English between the original edition and the sanctioned Russian edition.
In conclusion, both sources are important. Sometimes one is more important than the other in accordance with specific circumstances. For example, when we make a general survey about a certain subject, we may prefer rich references in library. On the other hand, if we want to know more specific details, we had better refer to experiences such as results of carefully designed experiments。
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