Lesson 5 of IT Home Learning - Blog Entry

Question 1:

I do not support lotteries. They are bad for people because they burn away the people’s hard earned money. Even if the person eventually wins something, it does not really make a difference because the person might have already spent so much money on lottery tickets that the winnings are not enough to cover the amount spent on the tickets.

For example, if a person spends $10 on 4D tickets everyday, and he does this for lets say 1 year, he would have spent: $10 X 30 days X 12 months = $3600! This is a lot of money even if $300 a month does not seem like a big amount of money. With $3600, you could buy lots of other more useful things like… a television set… or groceries… or… erm… I don’t know but you could always just save the money!

On the other hand, if you do win something in a lottery and you have only tried a few times so you have made a profit, you should just stop participating in the lottery. After all, the chances of winning a prize again are relatively low counting the number of other punters entering the lottery each day.

Even if you have won a lottery but is still not able to make up your losses, you should also stop participating in it. It is still better to earn some of your losses back then to lose your winnings by continuing to enter in it in the hopes of winning it another time.

This is the adult’s quote that is needed for this blog post: ‘Lotteries are a waste of time and money. There is no shortcut to earning money in life. You just have to work for your cash. The time you spend on the lottery could be used to look for a job or to work overtime.’

These are some of the quotes from NPR on gambling: ‘Addiction is a quiet monster.’ and that addiction is ‘behaviour that becomes so excessive it interferes with peoples’ lives’. These quotes show how dangerous gambling is. Once you are addicted, it will affect your life.

The best thing to do is still not to buy lottery tickets in the first place as then you will never lose any money to the lottery. You will also not get addicted to the lottery and continue to spend your money on it. Spending a large portion of your money could be potentially dangerous as that can lead to problems in life. These problems include being in debt and social difficulties as no one wants to be a friend to you because they are scared you will ask for money.

Reference (note this is ONE URL):
http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=90213926&m=90213905