136You have decided to give several hours of your time each month to improve the community where you live. What is one thing you will do to improve your community? Why? Use specific reasons and details to explain your choice.

Volunteering a few hours each week to some community activity is an important way of investing in the future of our society. I chose to spend my time working with elementary school children helping them to learn to read. Developing good reading skills will help these students keep up with their classmates, open new worlds to them, and help them succeed in life.

Students who are not good readers cannot keep up with their studies. They will not understand the lessons; they will come to school unprepared; they will not be able to perform. By learning to read, students will be on equal footing with their classmates. They will be active participants in class.

Books on different lifestyles, occupations, cultures, or governments will open new doors to students. Students who can’t read will only know what they see around them. Students who can read will be able to travel to new worlds and experience new ideas without ever leaving their classrooms.

Today, a person who can’t read is severely handicapped. A non-reader will have to work at the most menial jobs. Readers, especially good readers, have the whole universe open to them. They will have the possibility to learn any job that interests them.

By volunteering to help an elementary school child learn to read, I am helping him or her not only today, but for the rest of his or her life. I am helping them keep pace with their peers and explore the world and themselves through books.

137 Your school has enough money to purchase either computers for students or books for the library. Which should your school choose to buy—computers or books? Use specific reasons and examples to support your recommendation.

Our school has been given a grant to make necessary improvements to its facilities. We can spend it on new books for the library or on more computers. Our school already has books in its library and it already has computers. Since we have more books than computers, I think that new computers will benefit the student more.

Computers can access up-to–date information on the Internet. Right now, the reference books in our library are very outdated. Our encyclopedia set is eight years old. But if every student had access to a computer, we all could have the latest facts and figures on everything.

Unfortunately, giving every student a computer means we need a lot of computers. Right now, the ratio of computers to students is one to twelve. This means students only get to work on the computers three or four times a week. But if every student had a computer, we could use it whenever we wanted.

“Information on demand” should be our slogan. Students today need lots of information right away. Life goes by too quickly to wait. It takes forever to identify a book that you think might have the information you need. Then you have to go to the library and look for the book. Usually it’s not even there.

With a computer, information searches are instantaneous. If we all had computers, we could access more information and access it faster by computer. We could have all the information we needed for our schoolwork. We could all improve our grades. For these reasons, I feel that purchasing more computers will benefit us more than buying more books.