IELTS Writing Task 2 - Band 9 Sample Essays

Few questions in development economics provoke such durable disagreement as whether poverty is best reduced by growing the overall economy or by redistributing existing wealth. Both positions rest on serious empirical foundations, but neither is sufficient on its own, and in my view the most successful societies have combined them in deliberate policy mixes. Advocates of growth emphasise that, historically, no country has lifted millions out of absolute poverty without sustained increases in productivity. The transformation of South Korea from an aid-dependent economy in the 1950s into a high-income society within a generation is the textbook example, but the same pattern is visible in post-reform China, where hundreds of millions left extreme poverty as the economy industrialised. From this perspective, redistribution without growth simply rearranges scarcity; it cannot create the additional output that genuine improvements in living standards require. The opposing view counters that growth alone is no guarantee of reduced poverty if its gains accrue almost entirely to those at the top. The United States since the 1980s is often cited: aggregate income has risen substantially, yet median wages have stagnated and child poverty has remained stubbornly high. Wealth redistribution - through progressive taxation, child benefits, public health systems and well-funded education - directly addresses the conditions that trap families in poverty across generations, and the strong evidence from the Nordic countries suggests it can be done without crippling competitiveness. In my view, treating growth and redistribution as opposing strategies is a false choice. Growth provides the resources that make ambitious social policy fiscally sustainable; redistribution ensures that those resources reach the households that need them most. The countries that have done best on poverty reduction over the past half century - including Denmark, the Netherlands and Singapore - have pursued both at once, accepting that each compensates for the limits of the other. In conclusion, while economic growth and redistribution each have powerful proponents, the most enduring reductions in poverty have come from policy frameworks that pursue them in tandem rather than treating them as alternatives.

Whether schools should devote curriculum time to practical life skills or remain focused on traditional academic disciplines is a debate that surfaces in almost every education reform. While I agree that subjects such as personal finance and basic cooking deserve a more secure place in school timetables, I do not accept the implicit claim that they should displace academic study; they should complement it. The case for teaching life skills explicitly is compelling. Many adults arrive at financial decisions - choosing a mortgage, planning for retirement, evaluating credit - with no formal grounding whatsoever, and the consequences of poor choices fall hardest on those from disadvantaged backgrounds whose families cannot offer informal guidance. A short, well-designed financial-literacy course, taught at an age when these decisions begin to feel real, can produce measurable benefits across a lifetime. Cooking is similarly easy to defend: students who can prepare a balanced meal are healthier, less reliant on processed food and better equipped to manage household budgets. However, framing this as a substitute for academic learning misunderstands what schools can plausibly achieve. The intellectual habits developed by sustained engagement with mathematics, science, history and literature - abstraction, evidence-handling, the patient construction of an argument - are precisely what allow citizens to make sense of financial advice or nutritional guidance in the first place. A school that taught only practical skills would graduate students competent at the tasks of last decade and unprepared for those of the next. The sensible response is to integrate rather than choose. A finance unit can sit naturally within a mathematics course; a nutrition module can extend a biology curriculum. Many high-performing systems already do this, and the result is graduates who are both academically literate and practically competent. In conclusion, I agree that practical life skills should be taught more deliberately in schools, but only as a complement to a serious academic education, not as a replacement for it.

It is a familiar paradox of modern life that the more efficient our communications technology becomes, the harder many people find it to sustain genuine relationships with those closest to them. The reasons for this are both practical and cultural, but with deliberate effort the trend can be reversed at both individual and societal levels. The principal practical cause is the lengthening of working hours and commuting times in many economies. Even where official working weeks have shortened, the expectation of constant digital availability has effectively extended them, leaving little uninterrupted time for the long, unstructured conversations on which friendships depend. Cultural factors compound the problem: in highly individualistic societies, relationships are increasingly seen as something that should fit around personal projects and careers, rather than as obligations that organise daily life. The result is a quietly erosive process in which contact becomes infrequent, intimacy fades, and people then feel awkward about restoring connections that have lapsed. Addressing this trend requires action at several levels. At the individual level, treating significant relationships as a deliberate priority - by scheduling weekly calls or shared meals as one would any other commitment - sounds unromantic but has been shown to make a measurable difference. Framing such time as a non-negotiable appointment helps it survive the pressure of competing demands. Equally, adopting digital habits that protect attention, such as silencing non-essential notifications during family time, restores the conditions in which conversations can deepen. Wider structural change is also possible. Employers can support boundaries around working hours and discourage out-of-hours messaging; urban planners can design neighbourhoods that bring people into casual, unplanned contact; governments can fund parental leave and shorter working weeks where the evidence supports them. None of these alone is sufficient, but together they can shift the social expectations that make sustaining relationships feel unusually difficult today. In conclusion, the difficulty of maintaining meaningful relationships in modern life arises from a combination of overstretched schedules and cultural shifts, but it can be addressed through a deliberate combination of personal habits and broader social policy.