IELTS Writing Task 2 with sample answer.
You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.
Write about the following topic:
Some say that economic development is the solution to poverty: others say it is the cause of poverty.
What is your opinion?
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.
You should write at least 250 words.
Model Answer:
The so called economic development is an illusion. In spite of overwhelm economic progress billions of people around the world live in a squalid confinement of hunger, disease, and insecurity. This pandemic poverty puts forth the globe’s most venomous and fatal scourge. But the privileged minority is trying to subtly diddle by exalting economic growth. In today’s capitalist system, the political and corporate elites at the helm of the world economy are tailoring economy according to their interest. Consequently, on the one hand, wealth is being accumulated to the few people and on the other hand a large number of people are losing everything they have. Therefore, I am of the honest opinion that economic development does not necessarily mitigate poverty, and may, in fact, exacerbate.
We live in a world which is driven by capitalism that carries the seed of poverty. To clarify, capitalism is nothing but a vicious process in which capitalists hire labours and raw materials in order to produce commodity for selling. The price of the commodity is comprised of net value, value of labour power and surplus value. The difference between the net value of commodities and the value of labour power is surplus value which is eked out by the labours. The value of lobour power is the cost of maintaining and reproducing the worker and his family at a socially accepted living standard. Most of the cases, this includes only the bare necessity. That means labours are fed only the amount that he can again sell his labour for the next day.
In addition, capitalism is inherently an expanding system in which capitalists have to constantly accumulate and extend their capital in order to preserve it. They are bound to extend their capital otherwise they would be destroyed by their competitors. In the process, this expansion eventually takes place on a worldwide basis, because capitalists have to push their mode of production into every nook and cranny of the world. Nonetheless, capitalists also have an insatiable thirst for enjoying the consumption of their capital. Thus, labours are being exploited to earn surplus value which is again reconverted into capital; actually it is a gyration. In this gyration, a huge development takes place all over the world both infrastructure and workforce, but these are enjoyed by only few claimants of capital. Let us take situation in the USA for example. The lion’s share of wealth in U.S is possessed by 400 rich families, in which the six individual Wal-Mart heirs owns wealth more than 30% of Americans combined. Thus, few people make their own heaven and conjure up this as development in front of us.
From what has been discussed above it can be said that of course economic development is the prime cause of poverty. That is to say that economic development is the offspring of capitalism that is a process by which few people become rich to make the rest poor.