TOEFL整合寫作範文

The following responses are from the material of integrated writing course, 12/30, 2010. I hope that you all adhere to the preparing processes and practices I advised you to do last week. In a period of time, I'm sure that your summary skills will be improved. Good luck!

Correlation studies are useful tools because they describe relationships between different phenomena as they occur in the natural world. It is important, though, that researchers be careful not to make the common erroneous assumption that a correlation implies causation.
Correlations indicate when two variables are related naturally. This implies that researchers do not manipulate either variable; they simply observe events as they occur. For this reason, it is impossible to determine if one variable causes the other to change.
Furthermore, there is always the possibility of a third variable causing both to change. To demonstrate, the lecturer states that there is a positive correlation between ice cream consumption and drowning. A positive correlation means that as one variable increases, so does the other. So, in this example, as ice cream consumption increases, the rate of drowning increases as well. It is a fallacy, though, to interpret these finding as indicating that ice cream consumption causes drowning. In this case, there is a third variable that is affecting both—the weather.
Sometimes, it is acceptable to infer from a correlation study that one variable affects the other, such as in the example in the reading of increased study time being correlated to higher grades. It is very important, nonetheless, that one is careful to consider which variable affects which, and that there is not a third variable affecting changes in both variables.



The Turing Test, developed in 1950, allows subjects to interact with a person or a computer in another room by speaking into a microphone or typing questions onto a computer. When they receive an answer by voice synthesizer or by text on their computer screens, subjects must determine whether they have been communicating with a computer or with a human being. If they think that they have been interacting with a person or they are unable to decide, then the computer has passed the Turing Test proving that the machine is actually capable of higher-level thought processes similar to those of a human brain.
According to the lecture, however, a machine can be programmed to produce responses that appear to be intelligent without the awareness required for thought. In John Searle’s Chinese Room, an English-speaking person is able to respond to questions in Chinese by referring to source material that allows him or her to break the code without comprehending the underlying meaning of the symbols. The person can behave correctly without the higher-level thought required to process the meaning. Therefore, a computer could pass the Turing Test if it were programmed to generate behavioral output but the Turing Test itself would be flawed. The experiment would not prove that a computer can think.