Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
It is more important for students to understand ideas and concepts than it is for them to learn facts.
Main points in the topic.
Ideas and concepts, Facts
Discussion.
（1）Concepts come from facts.
（2）Facts count more in real world.
（3）However, facts can never live without concepts.
TEST TAKER'S RESPONSE.
Knowledge is indispensable for us to build our future career. In general, there are various approaches to obtain knowledge. Some people insist that understanding ideas and concepts is the most important, while the others argue that learning facts matters. From my perspective, given the reasons below, I strongly suggest students to understand concepts rather than learning facts.
Firstly, only when students know ideas and concepts well can they understand facts. In contrast, if we don't have a clear understanding about concepts and ideas, it will be impossible for us to further learn facts. For instance, before the Middle Ages, people insisted that the earth is the center of the universe, since they saw the sun and stars in the sky moving constantly. However, with the development of science and technology, more and more convincing theories as well as state-of-the-art techniques such as telescopes were invented, disproving the previous perspective reasonably. Consequently, people and scholars gradually noted that their original concepts about the center of the universe are wrong.
Secondly, understanding ideas and concepts, rather than learning facts, can help us solve problems and difficulties thoroughly. If we only focus on facts, we will end up paying our whole attention to superficial factors instead of those that are substantial and fundamental. For instance, the initial approach governments took to clean the polluted water was simply removing the dirt in the water, since they just focused on the fact that the water is unclean without the consideration of the reason why the water is polluted. In contrast, nowadays governments employ advanced concepts to improve the industrial technologies so as to avoid producing polluted water on the source, thus solving the problem fundamentally.
Thirdly, facts might be opposite to true concepts by accident, thus having misleading effects. In this situation, if we don't have a clear cohesion of the concepts behind the fact, we will end up misunderstanding it. Take myself as an example, when I was in high school, to write a report assigned by my biology teacher, I investigated a kind of insect in the campus. Much to my surprise, the color of the insects was not necessarily black, which was opposite to the concepts in the textbook. Afterwards, I learned that this phenomenon was caused by genetic mutation. Otherwise, if I had not learned the genetic mutation theory, I would have misunderstood the fact.
To sum up, despite the fact that concepts come from facts, it is more necessary for us to understand concepts and ideas, since learning concepts can help us understand facts better, solve problems thoroughly, and avoid the misunderstanding.