Monthly Toefl Essay #1: Ondol

Essay Prompt #1

Describe a custom from your country that you would like people from other countries to adopt. Explain your choice, using specific reasons and examples.

Imagine that you are asked to answer this question: “What is most necessary for a human to live?” Most common answers to this question is daily stuffs such as “food”, ”water”, ”clean air”, and etcetera. These answers are reasonable, and maybe they are right. Yet, in my opinion, the most important factor for human life is keeping warm environment. If not for heating systems, we would still be suffering from chilling winds of winter, thus becoming impossible to live in many parts of the world. In desire to become warm, we have created, and developed many methods of heating systems, starting from a single bonfire in primitive ages, to modern heating systems. However, most common and recent systems, such as air heating method, are so inefficient and costly, that they are wasting most of resources in the process of converting energy into heat. Also, they harm our environments by causing pollutants. To prevent these problems, I want to introduce Korean “Ondol”, Korean traditional floor heating system, to the world.

           First of all, it is essential for people to know that adopting modern Ondol will significantly trim the cost of heating system. Since modern Ondol uses circulation system, where the heat is constantly reused, there is no need for new supply of resources. Also, not much energy is required to process the system, and this consequently saves money. For example, I have lived in houses with completely different systems: one with air heating system, and one with Ondol. In the first house, I was afraid to turn on the “air heating system” because it demanded me too much. In contrast, the house with Ondol was always able to set the temperature to twenty-four degrees, due to non-stop utilization of Ondol. Which house do you think demanded less on the bill? Surprisingly, it was the Ondol, despite the fact that running time of Ondol overwhelmed the other. Considering that millions of people are anguished by the cost of heating throughout the world, Ondol sounds like an attractive solution.

           Also, there is more to Ondol than only helping individuals save their cash. Ondol, as an efficient heating system, will produce less pollution than most of other methods of heating. Unlike other heating systems that use fuels, Ondol does not produce contaminant such as CO2 or burnt wood pieces, since it only needs electricity. Moreover, Ondol needs smallest amount of energy among the systems that use electricity. To be specific, recent research shows that Korea, where most of house use Ondol as their house warming system, use least percentage of electricity on their residential heating among the world. While most other countries use 20~30% of electricity on heating, South Korea only use 13% of them. If Ondol is adopted worldwide, fewer resources will be used (to produce electricity), and reduce pollution significantly.

           Even though this short piece of essay only explained about Ondol, there are many other magnificent Korean traditions that can be adopted worldwide. In fact, some people may argue that there are more important customs to be propagated. However, the most pragmatic among all, possibly is Ondol. Unlike Kimchi or Doenjang which has been rejected by many people due to their unpleasant odors, Ondol will not be repulsed by foreigners, and rather be welcomed due to its usefulness; as explained above, Ondol will help people conserve energy, as well as protecting our surroundings. If Ondol spreads worldwide, people will dump all other systems and use the newly adopted one. Even though it will not be necessity to use Ondol, people will know what the wise solution is.