Should widespread advertising be strictly limited in modern society?
　　Some people claim that widespread advertising in the modern society has a harmful effect on young people. Therefore, advertisements should be strictly limited on TV, radio, the internet and in public places.
　　To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement?

　　Although advertising has existed for thousands of years and is certainly not a recent invention, it is only in our modern society that the great influence and importance of widespread advertising is full play. However, in my opinion, many advertisements are harmful to young people’s mental development and, therefore, should be banned in the mass media.
　　To begin with, various factors have given rise to the thriving of advertising industry, the most significant one being the proliferation of new products, services and technologies. In order to give their new inventions the utmost publicity, many businesses choose to promote them by broadcasting attractive advertisements through mass media, such as television, radio and internet. In addition, the increasingly fierce competition in the commercial world has compelled a lot of companies to resort to exaggerated and even deceitful advertisements to gain an edge over their business rivals.
　　As many social critics have pointed out, the current trend in advertising exerts a corrupting influence on young people’s minds because there are always a lot of unwholesome and indecent contents in modern advertisements. For example, products such as wines, lingerie and cosmetics tend to use the female body and amorous scenes as the main attraction of their advertisements. What is even worse, a subculture of sexual suggestiveness and permissiveness seems to permeate the entire advertising industry. Young people, especially those adolescents, are often lured away from their studies and indulge themselves in erotic fantasies
　　Therefore, the authorities should take serious steps to counteract the negative effects of immoral advertising. One effective approach is to establish and impose a strict censorship on all mass media, expunging any sexual explicit and implicit pictures and words from the advertisements they tend to show. Also, rules and regulations should be laid down to ban advertisements from certain public places, discouraging its rampant omnipresence and creating a cleaner and healthier social environment. Furthermore, all local governments can increase the costs of all kinds of advertisements to be shown or published through mass media, thus reducing their currently enormous quantities.
　　In summary, the prevalence of advertising in our modern society and its inimical effects on the youth of today must be curbed, otherwise public morality and traditional cultures and values and even the future of the world will be caught in a precarious situation.