Mass tourism has a negative effect on a country and should be discouraged. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement? Provide examples and supporting evidence to back up your opinion on this subject.
Sample Response
In recent decades, travelling overseas to experience new cultures and places has become the normhas been a norm. While excessive tourism has the potential to cause pollution in the surrounding habitat, I believe the resulting benefits for the nation’s economyresulting outcomes on the nation’s economy outweigh the downside.
Firstly, extensive tourism can cause harm to the country’s environment. This is because risinguprising demand for food, water, and energy from travellersby the travellers forces the country to supply enormous amountsamount of resources at the expense of the environment. Therefore, a possible resource shortageprobable resource deficit might drive the government to build more dams and burn more fuel to meet the demand, resulting in deforestation and poor air quality. For example, Khaosan Road, a popular street in Thailand, is congested with a large number of foreign visitorshigh volume of foreigners, leading to a huge amount of wastehuge amount of waste being discarded on the street every day. Ultimately, the spreadwidespread of tourism encourages pollution and destroys the nation’s pointspoint of interest that made the country attractivewhich made it attractive in the first place.
By contrastContrastingly, the influx of visitors can bring positive effects onto the country’s economic health. Often, tourists on holidayforeigners on a holiday are willing to spend money on local productsspend on local products for themselves and their loved ones. In developing countriesIn the Third World countries, tourists are charged higher pricesare subjected to higher prices when purchasing goods. However, many travellers do not bother to bargainare not bothered to bargain due to high currency exchange rates. This, in turn,This in turns drives the local economy, creating more jobs that will have beneficial ripple effects for local peopleprosperous ripple effects towards the natives. For instance, business owners selling hand-made cultural souvenirs can preserve their culture and way of life whilst receiving a handsome income. So, the economy is propelled in a progressive direction.
Why this response received Band 6.5
The response’s strongest feature is its clear position, supported by relevant discussion of environmental harm and economic benefit. Its main limitation is that the comparison between those effects remains implicit, while frequent awkward collocations reduce precision. The highest-priority improvement is to explain directly why the economic gains outweigh the environmental costs and reinforce that judgement in a concise conclusion.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Response
The response addresses the proposition, states a clear qualified disagreement, and supports both sides with relevant examples.
Make the promised outweighing judgement explicit by comparing the scale or importance of the two effects and restating the conclusion.
Coherence and Cohesion
Ideas progress logically through focused paragraphs, although the essay ends without a distinct concluding synthesis.
Add a brief conclusion that draws the two strands together and confirms the final position.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is varied and topic-appropriate, but recurring collocational choices such as descriptions of demand, tourist numbers, and economic effects sound unnatural.
Prioritize precise standard collocations and avoid forcing formal alternatives where a simpler expression is more accurate.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
A range of complex structures is used successfully, while recurring article, agreement, and countability errors remain noticeable but rarely impede meaning.
Proofread noun phrases systematically for articles, singular-plural agreement, and countable versus uncountable forms.
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IELTS Writing Task 2
Mass tourism has a negative effect on a country and should be discouraged. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement? Provide examples and supporting evidence to back up your opinion on this subject.
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.