The author describes how information can be inaccessible even when the need is great. Have you ever faced a situation where information you needed wasn’t available or was hard to trust? How does that help you think about finding credible sources for your own research?

A:

The phenomenon of facing the difficulty of finding important sources deeply resonates with me. Since I entered high school, I started to pay more attention on social incidents and politics, both national and international. However, I faced great obstacles during the process. For national social incidents, under China's strict censorship, many cruel, harsh news don't even have the possibility to be reported by the authoritative press. In the era of new media, in the era when everyone can be somewhat "news reporters", some incidents will be revealed on social media like Weibo, however, it's hard for these information to spread becasue for most of the times, they just disappear after a few hours. For international news, the authoritative press has firm stances and tend to cover some facts, which can be misleading even though technically the behaviour can't be called as lying.

As the solution, I started to surf on the international internet. By collecting news from different presses, various stances, I try to get near to the original truth, like doing a puzzle. This inspired me of finding sources for my own research. To add credibility, I should make sure that my sources comes from different aspects and do cross-proof when I'm comparing the international/national or academic/non-academic sources.