This is my response to a practice revised GRE Issue Essay response. I would love some feedback and scores that you would give the essay.
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Response
Progress is a natural instinct for everything living, and dictates the way we live our lives, and a society is not unbounded to this natural law. For any society to become great and advanced, it is clear through historical and current examples that improving on our past successes and creating novel ideas is essential. Though virtually everyone has a biological urge to progress, we also have a visceral instinct to cling unnecessarily to obsolete ways of thinking and ideas because it provides comfort. Sometimes adherence to archaic ideas are innocuous, like if you still listen to cassette tapes instead of digital MP3 players, but many times it prevents us from creating change and advancing society.
Before the automobile, there was the horse--man's main mode of individual, fast and reliable transportation. This was a great era in terms of transportation, however, a great problem arose amidst all the horses--manure. The problem was so impossibly unmitigatable that it created a whole sector of architecture dedicated to rising the home--this gave rise to the the graceful steps of the New York high stepped homes. The manure not only had an unpleasant smell, but it was a host of bacteria and diseases. If man stuck to what was high-comfort, which was horse transportation, there would have been no incentives for the automobile and the breakthrough in auto-technology in society. If we didn't step away from the comfort of "what already worked," then we should still be shoveling manure instead of filling our gas tanks.
Another example of holding on to unnecessarily obsolete ways that may limit our progress is slavery, or indentured servantry. In colonial America, slaves were the foundational work force on America's plantations and in the white man's homes. It was something indispensable to society, and even our great Presidents like Jefferson and Washington were guilty. However, a reliance on slaves impeded progress and circumscribed rights of a whole population of people, and ultimately contributed to the Civil War. This old way of living was comfortable for the white man and society; everyone knew how it works, and it was familiar, but it meant that one group of people had more rights than another. Without breaking free from this old way of thinking, America could not have become the great society we are today, with freedom for everyone and not a select few--a, unarguably, constituent of a great society.
When nations progress, with the contribution of its citizens and policies, there is more quality and it bolsters our innate rights as human beings, and this in change induces progress. Progress means driving towards freedom, and when people cling unnecessarily to old ways of thinking we are qualifying this freedom.
To support the idea that progress is congruent with freedom, take for example a society, like in Yemen, where parents are in charge of their children's marriages, and young girls are married off at young ages of 14, even 12, to men twice or even triple their age. This old way of thinking, in comparison to the rest of the world's standards, is harming their young population of girls and inhibiting their progress in society, and it is limiting the freedom of those young girls. The country is still below developing, and the world does not label it a great society, and a large contributor is the lack of freedom for its citizens. Now, if that tradition was lifted, and girls had the right to decide their own marriages when they are mature, the whole society is progressing because there is increased freedom.
A society is similar to an organism, and as organisms strive to fill their niche and become the best of their kind, so should societies. If there's something that can be improved, like the horse-carriage as the main mode of transportation, or if there's something that needs to change to give more freedom, like the abolishment of slavery, then they need to be done so that the society can progress. By keeping ourselves chained to comfort, we are preventing ourselves from becoming the best we can be through improvements and innovations.
