题目：Is it foolish to develop or improve things that already exist?
下面这篇范文以屠呦呦改进和提升传统的治疗疟疾方法的贡献以及李小龙通过创新和改进功夫的成就证明了不断改进和完善现存的事物是非常重要的。
The whole history of human civilization is a process during which people are not just satisfied with what have already existed and continuously strive to perfect and upgrade those existed things. From the examples of Tu youyou and Bruce Lee, it can clearly be seen that extraordinary persons are those who could develop and enhance existing things.
Tu youyou, a Chinese medical scientist, pharmaceutical chemist, pharmacist, and educator is known for discovering artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, used to treat malaria, which saved millions of lives dedicatedly improving traditional medicines. Malaria was once considered as one of the fatal diseases affecting human lives and was juxtaposed with cancer and AIDS. More than one million people died because of Malaia annually. Although there were some existed medicines, they were expensive and not effective enough to save millions of infected people, especially African people. The cost-effective treatment has been a puzzle for scientists for centuries. Facing this situation, Tu youyou spent 11 years working on developing effective cure measures for malaria. Her notebook summarized 640 prescriptions. Her team also screened over 2,000 traditional Chinese recipes and made 380 herbal extracts, which were tested on mice. In order not to be disturbed, she sent her two daughters away to live in other families. It is just through devotedly focusing on improving medicine without any hesitation that Tu youyou discovered artemisinin (named qinghaosu in Chinese), which saved 0.24 billion persons each year in Africa alone. Her devotion to improving medicine won her the noble reputation as the first Chinese Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine and the first citizen of the People's Republic of China to receive the Nobel Prize in natural sciences, as well as the first Chinese person to receive the Lasker Award.
Besides Tu youyou, Bruce Lee is another successful example in real life who obtained outstanding achievement through totally concentrating on improving and developing the existed thing, Kung Fu. Bruce Lee, a revolutionary of world’s martial arts, the father of MMA, the world-well-known filmmaker, was fascinated by Kung Fu of all kinds since he was young and throughout his life. But he was not satisfied with the current martial art system and was eager to improve and perfect it and build his own system. In order to enhance existed traditional Kung Fu, he would not lose a single second on exercising. He trained himself diligently everyday with unimaginable intensity, far beyond the boundary of human physics. He also read extensively on martial art and got in touch with other top-class martial art masters such as Joe Lewis, and Chunk Norris. There was nothing in his life that had no relation with his new and improved fighting system. The outcome of his concentration on perfecting Kung Fu was rewarding. He created a kind of creative Kung Fu, a free style boxing skill, which made him world-famous. He could do push ups with one finger only and kick a man away as far as 22 meters. He also created many world’s records, such as punching 7 times in one second. Even after he won the fame as the “world’s greatest fighter”, he did not stop developing and advancing Kung Fu. It was his continuous passion and focus on improving and developing Kung Fu by innovating his own martial art style that finally impressed westerners, wrote Kung Fu in western dictionary.
From the stories of Tu youyou and Bruce Lee, it is evident that only by improving and developing already existed things could people accomplish tremendous success for themselves and make great discoveries and contributions to the world. Had Tu youyou and Bruce Less not been dedicated wholeheartedly to developing and improving existed things, millions of African people’s lives could not have been saved and Kung Fu and Bruce Lee could not have been so influential in the world. So, it is imperative for all of us to purse improvement in everything in our life. Only by doing so, can we achieve exceptional success and can our world become more beautiful.
