【答案解析】[参考范文1]——同意题目的说法
I tend to agree that high sales of consumer goods reflect the power of advertising rather than the real needs of society and will outline my reasons below.
Advertising clearly often encourages people to buy more than they need and more often than they need to. In wealthier countries, many families have two or more televisions or even computers. People in wealthier countries also have many clothes, some of which they hardly ever wear. At the same time, even these wealthier countries have social problems such as poverty and crime. Many communities, again even in the wealthiest countries, suffer from a lack of investment in education and health care. It seems that people have somehow been persuaded to purchase a wide variety of consumer goods whilst neglecting to spend their money on areas where it could make a substantial qualitative difference to people"s lives.
Advertising tends to tell people that they need a certain product because of benefits such as making the purchaser look fashionable, apparently performing a task slightly faster or better, or even simply because it is good to have the things that everyone else has. These reasons might have limited benefits for the individual, such as enhanced status, but rarely, if ever, benefit society as a whole. This is obviously because the aim of most producers is to make ever greater sales, not to function as an organisation working for the public well-being.
To conclude, advertising generally aims to encourage the purchase of goods regardless of their value to societies in general. This has resulted in a situation where many people spend their money on things that they don"t really need, whilst not spending enough on things that they do need.
[参考范文2]——不同意题目的说法
Many people nowadays suggest that high sales of consumer goods, particularly in more developed societies, is the result of the power of advertising rather than any real need for these products. Generally speaking, I disagree with this notion and will outline my reasons in this essay.
At first sight, it might appear that people do not need the latest models of mobile phones or plasma screen TVs. In societies where buying these goods has become commonplace, almost all people already have their basic needs, such as food, clothing, health care and shelter taken care of. At the same time, they have greater disposable incomes. This means that the needs of such societies have changed from the provision of basic needs to the provision of luxury goods.
There is certainly more advertising in societies where more is consumed. These societies, as mentioned above, have more people with greater disposable incomes, so producers are bound to concentrate their marketing efforts on such societies rather than those where people have smaller amounts of money to spend on consumer goods. The real needs of societies where people have lower incomes (for example, in many African countries) are clearly still basic things like food, drinking water, clothing and health care. In those societies, advertisers concentrate on those products rather than on selling the latest consumer electronics.
To conclude, I believe that high sales of consumer goods (and the great number of advertisements) reflect high disposable incomes rather than the power of advertising. However, this is not to deny that advertising influences which consumer products people decide to buy.