The Effects of Two Dramatic Changes on Society

Requirements for the Paper

Task:

 

Include a formal outline with the final paper or lose 5 points off the grade of the paper.Grammar, spelling, and overall neatness will certainly affect your final grade on the paper, so be sure that your paper goes through each of the five necessary stages of writing (pre-writing, outlining, composing, revising, and proofreading) and that you have time to write carefully and correct your paper before turning it in to me. In this paper, you will consider what would happen if a specific and dramatic change to our world took place.

 

You will trace out the effects and developments good and bad that will result from the change. You will assume that everything else about life on Earth has remained the same: only one change has happened. Organize your paper by time sequences: what happens the first day, the first week, the first month, the first year, after five years, after ten years. Remember, too, that you are writing an essay, so make sure you draw a conclusion from the changes in your new society. Would life be better as a result of the original change and all the subsequent changes? Or would life be worse?

 

But what if, one day, adult humans needed only 4 hours of sleep in a week and children needed only 8 hours of sleep in a week with none of the usual effects of sleep deprivation? What would people do being awake all that time? How would schools, businesses, governments, families, and institutions adjust to this new reality? Would this be a good thing overall or a bad thing? 2. A typical lifespan may run for seventy years, and a healthy person will reach 70 while remembering all the key moments of life from childhood onward. A great deal of our sense of identity comes from our memories of past experiences what we learned, whom we loved, how we succeeded and failed, what we believed. What if, one day, human memory lasted no more than a single year? After that year, memory would reset to zero. People would still live as long, but they wouldn’t remember more than a year of their own pasts. How would relationships, careers, governments, religions, schools, businesses adjust to such a change? You must pick one of the topics listed on this sheet. Use what you know about causal chains, those series of events connected to each other by causation (a broken heel causing a woman to trip and fall, which causes her to break a bone in her foot, which causes her to go to the Emergency Room, which causes her to be sent home in a cast with orders to stay off her foot, which causes her to call in sick to work, which causes her to lose her job, which causes her to decide to take a chance and start the career she’s always wanted: professional musician.) Be imaginative but be realistic and logical too. When one thing happens, what follows as a natural result of that thing? Follow all the rules listed in Rules for Essays about appropriate language (no profanity, no slang, no jargon, etc.). If you have questions, ask me during class or e-mail me.