The Paragraph seven and Paragraph eight are two complete different in contents.
We can obviously see from the seventh paragraph that the author uses a lot of parallel structure in sentences. First, he/she makes a proposition that everyone show off for some kinds of personal need. For example, a middle school shows off by high rate of admitting to university. So it can enroll many students who are interested in the rate of admitting. Then he/she uses two long sentences with parallel structure. These two sentences give emphasis to showing off what is common and could forgivable, even acceptable sometimes. As the sense of boasting is widespread, we all want to express our best things. But everything has its limitation. When it comes to the limit, we are willing to accept the show-off. As we all know human beings like to dress up, especially the female. It is a nature too. However, when a person always talks about his or her new things, others will feed up with it. If we want to Show Up, maybe we should use it in a proper way.
The latter paragraph describes offensive show-off. There is only one word I didn’t familiar with: “narcissistic”. But I can guess its general meaning from the next part of the sentence. Society likes a big stage. We are the directors and actors. We direct and act the life which belongs to us and the centre of the stage, of course, are ourselves. But sometimes there appears a cross. The cross is our family, our friends, our colleagues, and the forth. Those inspire our show-off, because the leading role is not us. Someone wants to use show-off to be the centre of attention again. Competition happens. Hence, the author raises his opinion about unacceptable show-off motivated by a fierce competitiveness.
In all, every coin has two sides. We can’t control the happen of showing off. It’s nature. But what we should pay attention to is the way how we show off.
