Question

Write a five paragraph essay at least 200 words long on a topic of your choice. You must use one of the following essay types.

Answer 1

We use cameras every day, whether its to check our hair, update a friend on what were doing, or maybe just capture an important moment. Photography has become a big part of today’s culture. We don’t realize how much photography has evolved allowing us the ability to document our lives through pictures, so easily.  We will be examining some of the earliest known advances in photograph which brought us to where we are today.  Starting with the earliest known discoveries, to midcentury advances, to today’s ability to photograph almost anything.  

The earliest recorded principle behind photography was noted by a Chinese philosopher, Mo Ti, who lived during the fifth century B.C.E.  Mo Ti was one of the first known individuals to have documented the phenomena of the Camera Obscura. The Camera Obscura worked by allowing the light bouncing off an external structure, into a little hole in the side of the box, the light then reflected upside down against the wall opposite of the hole, the image showed up in complete color and detail. The Camera Obscura didn’t capture images but instead manipulated them. This allowed artists to trace those images.

The first ever picture was taken by Joseph Nicephorus Niepce in 1816. Niepce had taken a silver plate and covered it in bitumen, a chemical compound, he then exposed it to eight hours of sunlight capturing the first ever photograph known to mankind. Though this did not take off during Niepce’s life time, his idea was later utilized by his understudy Louis Daguerre.

Several years later, in 1838, Daguerre invented his own camera, called the Daguerreotype. This invention was made public and revolutionized the art of photography. This design did not largely differ from Niepce’s. A silver plate was coated in a very thin silver iodide layer, the plate was then placed into a Camera Obscura and exposed to mercury vapors which then induces the image to form when introduced to light. This process took about 60-90 seconds of sitting completely still to properly capture the image.

In 1839 Hippolyte Bayard, a Frenchman, discovered a way to take pictures on paper. A paper covered in silver chloride would be blackened with light, then covered with silver iodide and put into a Camera Obscura. The development time was about 30 minutes to 2 hours. The same year an Englishman by the name of William Henry Fox Talbot developed the first negative-positive process. This made it possible to multiply one picture.

In 1841, a physicist by the name of Fizeau desired to shorten the exposure time. Fizeau replaced silver iodide with silver bromide. Silver bromide is more sensitive to light than silver iodide. This made taking portraits a lot easier for both the photographer and the poser. In 1851, Scott Archer believed if he replaced albumen with collodion the picture quality would be clearer. The black and white pictures taken with this process had reached a quality unknown until then. The pictures that had collodion were incredibly clearer and cleaner than the pictures taken with albumen.  These advances would continue to be built upon.

In the years to follow, there were many tweaks to the camera to shorten exposure time and the invention of different lenses. It wasn’t until 1869, Louis Ducos du Hauron, made the first color photograph. He made three photos of the same subject, each of them through a different filter, a red, a yellow, and a blue one. He obtained three positives that he dyed with the color corresponding to each filter. By layering the images over each other, he got the resolution of the colors. Later, in 1906 physicist Gabriel Lippman received the Nobel prize for discovering a way to obtain photos in direct colors on one plate.

In 1913 the first 35mm Still Camera (also called the candid camera) was developed by Oskar Barnack. Later it became the standard for all film cameras. In 1948 Edwin Land invented the Polaroid camera which could take a picture and print it in about one minute. The evolution of cameras didn’t stop there. In 1981 Sony came out with the first digital electric camera, images from this camera were able to be displayed on television monitor. Soon after, other camera and electronic companies started coming out with their own digital cameras.  Apple and many other technology companies would build even further on all of these advances to bring us the abilities we have today.

Historically cameras have drastically transformed from box, to film, to polaroid, to digital.  Without the work of these inventors we wouldn’t be able to capture our precious moments.  The evolution and transformation of cameras has been a collaborative effort of ideas shared among inventors to create the “cameras” of today.  So next time you take a picture think about how much history went into allowing you to capture that moment and how your camera is just a snapshot of the time your living in.

Answer 2

Persuasive Essay

Why There Must Be Qualification Tests for Voting 

In western democratic societies, people have gotten used to almost absolute freedom: of speech, consciousness, self-expression, gender roles, and so on. Freedom of political will is among the benefits American and European societies enjoy as well; no one can be forced to vote this or that way, and even though during elections politicians fall over themselves to convince the electorate to vote in their favor, there are no guns pressed to voters’ heads: a person is free to vote any way he or she likes, or to not vote at all. At the same time, voting is not just a right: it is also a great responsibility of every member of a society, because each vote contributes to the results of elections, which in their turn will define the way society will have to live until the next election.

And this is probably the greatest catch: since in modern democratic societies a right to vote is granted to any citizen having reached a certain biological age, the political future of each particular society depends on a large mass of random people. In other words, not only knowledgeable, intelligent, conscious, and competent people with reasonable political positions can vote—and this is a problem. Why? Let us figure out why.

He suggests that people who know little to none about politics, how governments and economies work, and how political solutions affect societies—in other words, people ignorant about politics—should not be allowed to vote.

It might sound shocking at first, but people have got so used to their rights and freedoms that even the slightest limitation looks like totalitarianism to them. But, for example, how many Americans unsatisfied with Donald Trump’s rule are there? How quickly has his rating dropped since the moment he was elected a president of the United States? This data can be gathered on the Internet easily, so there is no point in discussing it here; what is important, however, is how Trump became president, and what was his target audience. Attentive observers must have noticed how primitive and naive his speeches were, how easily he blamed everyone, promised to build those infamous walls against migrants, and “Make America great again.. If his electoral base was not so ignorant and craving for quick solutions, it would question their candidate more, and would probably find out that there was no solid basis behind his loud words; as a result, America might have had a different president now, and the whole political course of the country could have been different.

Ignorant and poorly-educated people always make the majority of the population. Ancient Greeks knew that; nowadays praised for inventing the democratic form of rule, Greeks had numerous limitations for those who wanted to participate in the political life of their society. Many of them would be unreasonable to implement today: to tell a long story short, a right to vote belonged only to free male citizens of Ancient Greece’s cities (Inside Loyola), and some Greek city-states also required voters to match additional criteria, such as education or a certain level of income. This way, Greeks filtered those social categories who were biased towards certain subjects; for example, poor people would obviously vote for candidates who promised to make them rich, ignorant and uneducated people would vote for those who promised them unearthly goods and happiness, and so on. By granting the right to vote to few, Greeks ensured that those few were educated, knew about the current problems of the city-state they lived in, understood how the system worked, and were interested in the best possible outcomes for everyone could vote.

The idea of making citizens pass a special test to ensure their ability to make informed decisions during elections might seem limiting and somewhat authoritarian. Many people have got so used to their rights and freedoms that the idea of even the slightest limitation makes them scared. However, there are reasons to believe that qualification tests could not damage, but heal and improve the political system of the United States, because such tests would ensure that, metaphorically speaking, little children will not put forks into electrical sockets—meaning that ignorant people who have no idea about how the United States’ society works will not be able to affect its life through voting during its elections.

there you go, its the whole essay! ;}