The biggest advantage of an electronic dictionary is its convenience. Whenever you meet new words or expressions, you can know the meaning quickly. What's more, with the development of science and technology, electronic dictionaries are becoming more and more advanced: they can pronounce the words clearly, provide sample sentences to illustrate word usage and store difficult words for special memorization. Last but by no means the least, electronic dictionaries are becoming cheaper and cheaper, and more and more students can afford them.
However, the negative effects are also obvious. To begin with, some students rely too much on the electronic dictionary—they never put their heart into learning new words and expressions. In the second place, some explanations are neither complete nor accurate, which are quite misleading. Finally, new technical inventions do not necessarily lead to progress in learning. Diligence is always the decisive factor, because "there is no royal road to learning".
Up until now, we can see it clearly that an electronic dictionary is not beneficial or harmful in itself. The key lies in the user—so long as we can make proper use of it, it can be most helpful to us in many respects.
點評
首段提出壹個長時間爭論的話題；第二段中指出該事物的優點；第三段闡述缺點；第四段首句下結論，表明此事物本身無對錯，第二句指出關鍵在於使用者，即如果合理使用，就會從中受益。
範文首段指出，有關電子辭典的討論從來沒有停止過；第二段闡述優點，即電子辭典便於查詢，而且隨著技術的發展，電子辭典功能也越來越多，另外價錢也越來越低；第三段提出缺點，電子辭典讓學生產生依賴心理，而且有些解釋不準確，另外技術的進步不壹定帶來學習上的進步；最後壹段總結，電子辭典本身無對錯，關鍵在於正確使用以便為我們服務。
第二段第三句中的illustrate表示“用圖或例子來說明”；第三點中的afford表示“買得起”。第三段第壹點中的rely too much on表示“過分依賴”；put one's heart into doing sth．表示“專心致誌於某事”；第二點中的accurate表示“精確的”，misleading表示“使人誤解的”；第三點第二句中的decisive factor表示“決定因素”。