General Training Writing - Task 2

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Write about the following topic:

In Britain, when someone gets old they often go to live in a home with other old people where there are nurses to look after them. Sometimes the government has to pay for this care.

Who do you think should pay for this care, the government or the family?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Write at least 250 words.

model answer:

One of the most challenging problems of today’s society is the question who should be responsible for our old people. It’s not only a financial problem but also a question of the system we want our society to have. In my essay I would like to consider different models.
Firstly, the company can be responsible for their retired employees. For this reason a special fund could be established. The advantage of this model is, if you believe in the capitalist system, that it should be the cheapest solution. A possible problem is that the companies might have competition disadvantage due to higher staff costs.
A second solution is that the government has to have the responsibility for the old people’s case. It can finace this with its tax incomes. Actually, this is the most democratic model since everybody gets as much money as he or she needs. Unfortunately, as the present situation in our society shows, this solution seems not to work very well. The government can no longer afford supporting all the old peoples.
Another way of solving this problem is to give such the responsibility to the individual that means that everybody has to save money during their working life for the time after their retirement. This seems to be not a very fair model because there will certainly exist people who can’t afford to save part of their salary. In this case the government would have to save for them.
A last solution is to go back to the old model of “the big family” who cares for all their members. I don’t think this is possible in our day’s society because the family structures have so much changed. To sum up, I have to admit that I can’t find a really good solution for this problem all models have advantages and disadvantages. Certainly we have to think about this topic much more in the future.

EXAMINER COMMENT: (Band 8)

This is a very well organized script which contains a lot of well-supported arguments and analyses the topic from different angels. The ideas follow each other well and there is a very honest conclusion. The answer is easy to read. There are some areas where the expression is clumsy but this makes little difference to the overall flow of the answer. There are minor errors in spelling and structure.