Awards and prizes are given for excellence in various fields. Do these awards and prizes serve a useful purpose? Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
Rewarding excellence is a very good way of recognising the contribution made towards a certain field. Awards and prizes have many useful purposes. Some significant advantages of giving awards are discussed as follows.
Firstly, awards provide the best way of recognising talent in any field. Each year, The Grammy Awards attract hundreds of young talented singers into the music industry. Awards are given out in various categories which are meant to recognize talent and excellence in music around the world.
Secondly, prizes provide a source of inspiration, especially to the aspiring professionals in a field of study. Apart from the monetary reward, Nobel Prize is one of the most prestigious prizes in the world which many people in the world would aspire to get.
Thirdly, each award or reward has a monetary value, whether in cash or kind, and serves as means of compensation for the hard work undertaken by the awardees. Monetary benefits are crucial for success of any awards programme, as it provides a direct link of efforts with rewards.
Ominously, awards may lead to stiff competition, which can further aggravate into use of unfair means to claim an award. On many occasions, athletes resort to doping and subsequently lose their prizes when they fail the doping test. Also, children at a young age can become ‘reward conscious’, and may get trained to work solely for rewards. Such behaviour may jeopardise their process of natural thinking and innovation.
In summary, rewards and recognition serve some important purposes that may not be replaced by other means. From ancient history to recent past, there any innumerable accounts of rewards and prizes given out to those who excelled in their field and have brought good to humanity.
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