You Are Not A Number.

Essay by hellokitty_1stCollege, UndergraduateA+, June 2003

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You Are Not A Number

One will disagree with the statement, "You are a number" since a number is too simple to justify the person that one is. In fact, a number cannot show how sweet an individual?s personality is or how attractive he/she looks. What people observe with their senses cannot be measured. Not every existing thing in the world is reducible to a number. Hence, the statement, "You are a number" is false.

Although numbers can identify who a person is, it does not tell what he/she is like inside. Of course, there are many numbers that an individual can be identified with such as university application number, student number, bank account number, credit card number, and car license plate. Other numbers are also associated with people?s lives such as, telephone number, height, number of bones in a person?s body, 23 pairs of chromosomes in each human body, even DNA genetic code can be converted into numbers.

However, none of these show characteristics, attitudes or feelings of a person.

A number is a quantity, not a quality! A number gives an amount, measurement, and extent or it can be used as a guided reference such as the duey decimal number system used in libraries. Numbers alone 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 do not show anything. It is the order that they are put in which makes them significant. There is no variation in how the numbers are read when they are put in different orders. But there is variation with the letters in the alphabet, which make up words. Only words have the ability to give quality to things. Adjectives are words that describe things. Obviously, ?good?, ?tall? ?beautiful?, and ?cute? are not numbers. The first number is 0 as it is the lowest and the last is 9999?

Prisoners/criminals put in...