1

社交媒体Social media: connection or performance?

2026.10.31

Professor Chen: Some people say social media has brought us closer together; others argue it has left us more isolated than before. What is your view, and why?

Kelly: It keeps me in touch with relatives overseas. Without it we would have lost touch years ago.

Andrew: Most of what I see online is performance. People broadcast their lives instead of living them.

范 文 · 186 words

Kelly’s point about family abroad is well taken, but I think the effect depends less on the platform than on what the user is doing with it. My own experience suggests a distinction between coordinating and broadcasting. When my cousin moved to Toronto, our family group chat was purely coordinating — who meets whom at the airport, who sends the birthday money. That use genuinely strengthens ties, because it replaces phone calls that would never have happened. What worries me is the other mode. A classmate of mine spent an entire concert filming it, and when I asked about the music she admitted she had barely heard it. Andrew is right that this is performance, but I would not call it isolation either; it is simply a different activity that happens to look social. So my answer is that social media amplifies whatever intention the user brings to it. The more useful question for researchers is not whether it is good or bad, but which habits predict which outcomes.

加分点：不站队，另立二分（coordinating / broadcasting），同时回应两位同学；用真事取代抽象论断；结尾把问题重新定义，是学术讨论最讨好的收法。

2

环境改善的路径Individual habits or government policy?

2026.10.31

Professor Patel: Which is more likely to produce real environmental progress — changes in individual habits, or government regulation?

Kelly: Individuals. Millions of small choices add up to something large.

Andrew: Policy. One law changes more behaviour than a million good intentions.

范 文 · 191 words

Andrew is right that individual choices cannot fix a system, but I would frame the two as stages of one process rather than competing options. Consider the plastic bag. For years my hometown asked shoppers to bring their own, and almost nobody did. Then the city imposed a small charge, and within a month the habit changed without any further persuasion. What the regulation did was not force people to care; it made caring cheap to act on. That suggests a division of labour: individuals create the demand for policy, and policy makes individual virtue practical. Kelly’s point that aggregate habits matter still holds, but her argument assumes people have a convenient alternative. In my neighbourhood the recycling bins sat three streets away until last year. No amount of goodwill survives a twenty-minute walk in the rain. So I would put the money on infrastructure first — and on citizens who vote for it.

加分点：先承认对方（Andrew is right that…），再改成“同一过程的两阶段”；用塑料袋收费这个可验证的小例子承担全部论证；短句收束有力度。

3

全球化与地方经济Has globalization helped local economies?

2026.10.31

Professor Alvarez: Some argue globalization has brought jobs and cheaper goods to local communities. Others say it has destroyed local business. Which side do you find more convincing?

Kelly: It brought investment and lower prices. My town has more choices than it did ten years ago.

Andrew: The shops on my street are gone. That is what "cheaper goods" cost us.

范 文 · 189 words

Both Kelly and Andrew describe real effects, but I think the outcome depends on whether a region produces something the world wants, not on globalization as such. My uncle runs a small coffee roastery. Ten years ago he sold only to neighbours; today he ships to Korea and Germany and employs six people instead of two. Openness did not threaten him — it saved him, because it gave him customers no local market could supply. The businesses that suffered in my town were the ones competing on price with imports: the shoe factory closed, and nothing replaced it. The difference was not openness but whether there was a distinctive product behind it. So globalization rewards specialization and punishes imitation. That is a harsh rule, but it also tells governments exactly what to do: instead of resisting trade, help local firms find the one thing they can do better than anyone else, and then get out of the way.

加分点：用一个反例（舅父的咖啡烘焙）打破“非正即负”的框架；把结论上升为一句可引用的判断；末尾给政策建议，显示论证有出口。

4

品牌忠诚还是新客Retention or acquisition?

2026.10.25

Professor Gupta: Companies must decide whether to invest in loyalty among existing customers or in attracting new ones. Which matters more for a firm, and why?

Kelly: Loyal customers give steady revenue and recommend the brand to others.

Andrew: New customers expand market share, which is what drives growth in competitive industries.

范 文 · 184 words

Dr. Gupta frames this as a choice, but the two are usually financed from the same budget and should not be compared in isolation. A friend of mine runs a small bakery. She spends nothing on advertising and everything on the people who already come: remembering their orders, holding a loaf back for the customer who finishes work late. Her revenue has doubled in three years without a single promotion. That looks like proof that loyalty wins — except that most of her new customers arrived because an old one brought them. Retention was quietly doing the acquisition. For a small firm, then, loyalty is the cheaper growth strategy precisely because it produces word of mouth no campaign can buy. For a large firm entering a new market the logic reverses, since it has no existing customers to keep. The better question is not which matters more, but at what stage of a company’s life each one pays.

加分点：用“同一笔预算”拆掉题目的二分；一个具体店铺承担全部论证；“Retention was doing the acquisition”这类短判断句是高分标志；结尾按企业规模分情况，避免绝对化。

5

国际组织是否有效Are international organizations effective?

2026.10.25（10.17 亦考）

Professor Diaz: Institutions such as the UN, WHO and WTO are meant to promote global cooperation. Critics say they are slow and dominated by powerful states. Are they effective in achieving their goals?

Kelly: They coordinate what no single country could do alone, and that coordination has saved lives.

Andrew: They have no real power. When interests collide, they simply watch.

范 文 · 187 words

I would split the question in two, because effectiveness in health and effectiveness in security look nothing alike. The WHO’s smallpox campaign is the strongest case for the optimists: an organization with almost no enforcement power eliminated a disease that had killed millions, mainly by coordinating surveillance and persuading governments to share samples. Where such bodies fail, in my view, is exactly where force is required. The Security Council could not stop the war in Syria, and no amount of institutional redesign would have changed that, because the veto is built into the structure. So the criticism that these organizations are slow and captured by powerful states is accurate, but it describes one function rather than the whole institution. Kelly is right that coordination has real value; Andrew is right that it collapses when interests collide. My conclusion is that we should stop asking whether international organizations work, and start asking which problems they are structurally capable of solving — then design the next ones accordingly.

昆明托福雅思培训高分，初高中英语强化。

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