Question: It has been said “not everything that is learned is contained in books”. Compare and contrast knowledge gain from books. In your opinion which source is more important? Why?

My essay: (please review and rate)
Although books are primary sources of knowledge in the world, not every information we need can be found in books. Another main source of knowledge is our own experience. Each of them has some distinct advantages and disadvantages. According to their specification, I personally prefer books as the most important source of knowledge because it is more practical to read books than experience everything by yourself. Moreover a lot of people like me really enjoy reading books.

One of the main advantages of gathering knowledge by experience is that when you experience something, it will often keep in your mind forever, for example imagine you have experienced a fact by your own hands in a physics laboratory. It is obvious you have learnt and remembered it much more than when you have just read that fact in a physics book. Another advantage is that it is much more fun than read a boring book.

On the other hand, we can never experience everything by ourselves, so we actually need book to learn from other people's experiences or thoughts. So the main advantage of reading books is that we can benefit from other people's experiences without any cost.

According to the advantages of each source which is discussed above, in my opinion books are more important than experiences. That is because it is much more practical. For example, you want to get familiar with the culture of a foreign country; it is much easier to read books to learn that instead of traveling there to find it out by yourself. The second main reason is that reading books is an joyful hobby for people like me, so we can find a lot of information while we just having fun by reading books.

You can gather information either by reading books or by experiencing. Each of them has its distinct advantages which often are disadvantages of the other. In my opinion books are better sources of knowledge than experiences, because a lot of people enjoy reading and also it is more practical to learning from books than experiencing everything by ourselves.