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“Free cheese, only trap”

“Free cheese is only found in the mouse trap”

Tatyana told me that she learned this proverb from her parent when she was fairly young. She doesn’t really remember her age, but she imagines she was probably nine or ten. She told me that her parent use to tell her this when she was small to show her that to earn a good life she needs to work. Tatyana believes that this proverb holds true, if you want to earn a good life you need to work.  She says that if you want to be a free loader, you might rely in your luck and chances are you will perish as only the strong survive this world. Finally, she said that this proverb is use to show kids that they need to work hard and prevent taking things for free.

I agree with Tatyana, this proverb is a great way to teach people that free loading can be dangerous and that working for a reward is better that mooching. If you start to mooch, sooner or later the mouse trap will deploy and will hit you hard. This is saying that it is safer to work than to just stay back and relax. This can be applied to real life situations in the United States. Most classes do student based assignments and there are some students that just let the rest of the group do the work while they take a Sunday afternoon drive. Sometimes they aren’t caught and receive a decent grade, but the day they get caught they have to pay heavy consequences. When they are finally caught, most of the student learn their lesson and start to work for their grade. However we can see that could have been avoided if they would have followed the lesson in the proverb and work hard for their grade in the first place.