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Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)

/^t/Surpisingly, ignorant people seem to be even happier; they have the necessities that can be rather easily fulfilled, they have fewer demands and their expectations for success are relatively low. They often do not realize that they are ignorant. Somebody whose aim is to have a greengrocery shop can dream of it for many years, as well as a scientist dreaming of discovering a new form of life, and they have a completely different opinion on happiness and richness. The greengrocer can often feel fairly well-off and be highly respected by the society he lives in, whereas a scientist will conceive new problems accompanying his discovery that would disturb him. It must be admitted that the feeling of being rich or poor is a relatively subjective feeling. We tend to underestimate other people's abilities and we often subconsciously envy and criticise somebody's succes. In that way we somehow want to lessen their validity. Therefore, people prefer to claim that most of the people are rich and ignorant as we do not want to admit that they are simply wise or have a stroke of luck.