Film stars and music celebrities may earn a great deal of money and live in luxurious surroundings, but many of them lead unhappy lives. Do you agree? To what extent is this the price they pay for being famous?
Sample Response
Newspapers and magazines are full of stories about famous people and the wonderful lifestyles that they enjoy. I think it's something that we get used to. We expect to see them wearing very expensive clothes and goingand, going to amazing parties. It seems natural that if you have a lot of money, you will spend it on such luxuriesin these ways. Some people who are rich and famous do manage to also lead happy liveshave a happy life as well. They get married and have children and althoughchildren and, although they have to work hard, they still have time to devote to their familiestime to give to their family. Victoria and David Beckham are just one example of a happy celebrity couple. However, money doesn't always bring happiness. In fact, sometimes the opposite is true. Stars often talk to the press about the pressures of being rich and famous. Some of them end up drinking too much or taking too many drugs. The actress Elizabeth Taylor, for example, has been in clinics many times for these problems. The divorce rate is also very high among celebrities. Often their marriages last only a short period of time and they remarryre-mary very quickly, butvery quickly but the same thing happens again. Ultimately, I think it depends on the individualperson. I don't really believe that being unhappy is a consequence of fame, butconsequence of fame but I do think that it may be very difficult to cope with wealth and famehaving a lot of money and fame. Celebrities are ordinary people at heartordinary people underneath and perhaps some of them are not strong enough to deal with their fame.
Why this response received Band 7.0
The response offers a balanced, relevant view and supports it with concrete examples of both happy and troubled celebrities, while maintaining generally fluent language. Its main limitation is the single-block organisation and only general treatment of how far unhappiness is the price of fame; the highest-priority improvement is to use purposeful paragraphs and connect each example more explicitly to that second question.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Response
The response addresses both celebrity unhappiness and its relationship to fame, presenting a clear, qualified position with relevant examples.
Explain more precisely how each pressure caused by fame contributes to unhappiness and state the extent of that responsibility earlier.
Coherence and Cohesion
The argument moves logically from glamorous lifestyles to contrasting outcomes and a qualified conclusion, with clear connective language.
Divide the response into an introduction, focused body paragraphs, and a conclusion so the stages of the argument are easier to follow.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is varied and appropriate for discussing wealth, pressure, addiction, relationships, and the consequences of fame.
Reduce repetition of fame-related words and proofread isolated spelling and phrasing lapses to improve lexical polish.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
The response uses a good mix of simple and complex sentences with generally secure control and clear meaning.
Review comma placement around coordinated and subordinate clauses, particularly where punctuation interrupts otherwise correct sentence structures.
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IELTS Writing Task 2
Film stars and music celebrities may earn a great deal of money and live in luxurious surroundings, but many of them lead unhappy lives. Do you agree? To what extent is this the price they pay for being famous?
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.