Bac oral anglais ( Idea of pregress )

Bonjour, j'ai fait du mieux que je pouvais, cependant, n'étant pas bilingue, ma correction peut sans doute contenir des erreurs...

I’m going to talk about the notion "Idea of progress". To begin, I’d like to give a definition of progress. The idea of progress consists in believing that the world can become better in terms of art, science, technology, liberty and quality of life, so progress implies change and evolution. However, the idea of progress is debated between those who approve these changes and those who resist and criticize them in the name of tradition. In relation to the notion, I’m going to talk about consumerism. We may wonder what are the limits of consumption? My presentation will fall into 3 parts. First of all, I will concentrate on the overconsumption, then I will analyse the negative impact of it before finally focusing on the reaction of the consumer society.

To start, I chose the video Black Friday Frenzy that turns violent to illustrate the overconsumption. This video shows us today’s consumption society through Black Friday, the opening day of giant sales in America. It draws our attention to the fact that people consume a lot and that they can even fight each other in order to get the best bargains which means they can do anything in order to consume more and more. Actually they are 97 million shoppers on the first day and 140 are expected by the end of the week. We also can see 40 billion dollars? have been spent on that day. Moreover, since the economic crisis, consumer’s purchasing power has decreased dramatically, so most of them wait for sales. In this document the narrator doesn’t side with anybody, he just reveals the behavior of the consumers.

However we have to know the consumption can be dangerous. For example on the document Shopaholics anonymous which is a letter written by an anonymous shopaholic, we can assume she is ashamed of her addiction and that's why she doesn't want to tell her name. Actually she is been shopaholic for almost 30 years, there was no way for her to stop it. She struggled with compulsive spending for decades but she felt completely hopeless. Indeed she was aware that she was running the risk of being indebted because she spent her whole budget on shopping. That’s why she was looking for psychological help in order to get rid of her addiction.
Yet consumerism also has a lot of negative impact on our society. As we can see in the video Adbuster, of Kalle Lasn on CNN for Buy Nothing Day, consumer society is responsible for damages on the environment. In the other words, the production of waste provokes pollution. This video also points out the unfair distribution of wealth. Indeed 1 billon people consume 86% of the earth’s natural resources, whereas 5 billion people consume only 14% of it. So our consumer society is damageful both for the environment and for development and the poorest. That’s why Kalle Lasn is against consumerism.

In order to help our society consumers should consume less. As Kalle Lasn said it: we can join the buy nothing. Actually the website of buy nothing day asks us to challenge ourselves by taking a break of consumption for one day. We also have to be environment friendly for example by recycling. Beside we should question the products we buy and challenge the companies which produce them in order to make them respectful both to the environment and to working condition.

[To put it in nutshell the progress as the consumption] qu'est-ce que tu veux dire ? allow people to get what they want. However it makes them forget what is really important like the environment because once we destroy it we will never be able to fix it again. Beside it also creates a new kind of addiction like the shopaholic: the fact of buying more and more useless thing and forget what we really need. However consumerism is only one kind of progress.

Bonne chance ! ;)