题目：Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?

The extended family(grandparents,cousins, aunts and uncles) is less important now than it was in the past.

I agree with this point that the extended family is less important now than before. As human being has been all time developing, time has passed when people need to stick together to protect themselves. Moreover, sweeping changes have taken place in the latest century, so do people's behaviors.

First, the most important and common labor has switched from agriculture to industry. As a result, people are not restricted within their land. More and more young generations migrate to the city to seek fortune, and thus settle down. Then the grandparents or even parents are separated with the young generation. Living solely in the apartment, a family cannot feel connected as before when a large family lived in a big yard.

Second, thrived technology has made the world smaller while people, farther. People will more likely to use instant message appliance to know what others are doing. People chat with others when they want instant response. And there is also an possibility that the grandparents and uncles and aunts are out of trend, so that they cannot even appear on the appliance. Above all, technology changed the way people connect.

Third, nowadays, everybody has fully involved into his or her own business. Students have homework and researches to do, while adults have to engaged themselves into work. It's hard to have a perfect time to reunion the extended family unless in traditional festival, like the Spring Festival. 

There might be another reason in China that after one-child policy, the uncles or aunts are not the immediate family members of one's parents, which made the relationship less direct.

With the above factors, the extended family has been less important than before. It may change soon in China as the government adopted new family-plan policy, or may not, as the technology development won't stop.