Some think that governments should tax unhealthy foods to encourage people to eat healthier. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
Sample Response
Some think that heavy-handed governmental taxation is the only way to compel healthier eating. In my opinion, while this makes rational sense, its actual effectiveness is questionable.
Those whothat argue in favour of these taxes can point to a logical chain of assumptionssuppositions. Though taxes on unhealthy foods are rare, there is the occasional mandated price hike for sugary drinks and fast food, smoking is an instructive corollary. Several decades after research showed that smoking causes cancer, governments were able to push through legislation to tax cigarettes heavily. The result was that those already addicted to smoking continued to smoke but many people did not pick up the habit to begin with. Proponents argue this would also be the case when it comes to foods known to cause cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. Many would eat them despite higher prices but the next generation would become more health conscious and that would further trickle down to their children.
Though the above argument is well reasoned, people will still buy luxuries. There is strong evidence for this dating back centuries. After the American War of Independencewar of independence from Britain, the newly formed United States instituted urgentlydirely needed taxes on luxuries including whiskey and chocolate. The purpose of the taxes was to raise money, not to lower consumption of those products. The unpopular acts were internally vindicated when people continued to buy luxuries along the same growth trend, enabling them to increase the national budget. Even though cutting down on purely pleasurable products makes rationaldisinterested sense, people are more swayed by instant gratification than cold calculation.
In conclusion, taxes on unhealthy foods would not be an effective measure for reducing their consumptionmeasure against their consumption. Instead, governments should invest more in providing healthy school lunches and making healthy productsinvest more in healthy school lunches and making healthy products more widely available to attack the problem at its rootroot source.
Why this response received Band 8.0
The essay maintains a clear position while examining the strongest rationale for taxation and then rebutting it with an extended historical example, producing a persuasive and well-controlled argument. The main limitation is occasional strained wording and one overloaded sentence that briefly obscures the relationship between examples. Refining collocations and separating densely packed claims would make an already sophisticated response more precise and effortless to read.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Response
The position is clear throughout, and both the rationale for taxation and the counterargument are developed in substantial depth.
Make the historical evidence more directly comparable to unhealthy-food taxation by explicitly explaining the limits of the analogy.
Coherence and Cohesion
Paragraphing and progression are highly effective, with ideas linked logically across a sustained argument.
Split the long sentence introducing the smoking comparison so each relationship is immediately clear.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is wide-ranging and sophisticated, though a few collocations sound strained or imprecise.
Replace unnatural phrases such as “internally vindicated” and “makes disinterested sense” with more idiomatic, exact wording.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
A wide range of complex structures is used accurately, with only isolated punctuation and sentence-boundary lapses.
Check sentences containing several clauses for comma splices and divide them when independent ideas compete for attention.
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IELTS Writing Task 2
Some think that governments should tax unhealthy foods to encourage people to eat healthier. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.