Most people agree that money cannot bring happiness. Why is happiness difficult to define? How can people achieve happiness?
Sample Response
Some people argue that happiness comes from moneyhappiness is come from money, while other people think that happiness cannot be boughtbought by anything. I believe that there are a lot of factors to make people happy, not only by having much money. People have their own way of consideringtheir own way to consider what happiness is and what can satisfy themwhat things can make them satisfied. Happiness is not a material goodHappiness is not goods, not something that people can see withfrom their eyes or something that they can hold in their hands. Happiness is about what people feel, how much they thank for what they have been having in their life. Naturally, people experience feelings of dissatisfactionare created with a dissatisfying feeling. They will never feel satisfied with their livesfeel enough in their life, even if they haveeven they have unlimited money in thea bank. That is the reason why happiness is difficultthe happiness is difficult to define. Nowadays, many things are measured by wealth and possessionspossession. People think that money is the most important factor in achieving happiness, sothing to be happy, so they try to work hard and earn as much money as they canearn money as much as they can. They do not realise that research has proved that some rich peoplesome of the rich people are not really happy with their liveshappy in their life. On the other hand, many people consider themselves happymany people consider happy when they have a harmonious family. They do not need much money to be happy, because by having a loving spouse and childrena good husband, wife and children, they can feel satisfied. In conclusion, I think that allevery people have their own definition of what happiness is. Some people agree that money is the most important thing to be happy and some others believe that money cannot make all of them satisfied, so it depends on their point of view.
Why this response received Band 5.5
The response offers a recognizable central idea that happiness is personal and cannot be reduced to wealth, and its meaning remains generally understandable. The main limitation is that it spends much more time explaining why happiness is difficult to define than showing how people can achieve it; the highest-priority improvement is to answer the second question directly with several developed, practical routes to happiness in clearly separated paragraphs.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Response
The difficulty of defining happiness is discussed, but ways of achieving happiness are only briefly and indirectly developed.
Add a focused section explaining several attainable sources of happiness and support each one with reasoning or an example.
Coherence and Cohesion
The argument follows a broadly understandable sequence, but presenting the entire response as one paragraph weakens organisation.
Separate the introduction, each question's answer, and the conclusion into distinct paragraphs with clear topic sentences.
Lexical Resource
The vocabulary is adequate for the topic, though repetition and frequent unnatural word choices limit precision.
Use more natural expressions for gratitude, satisfaction, and family relationships while reducing repetition of happy and money.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
Both simple and complex sentences are attempted, but frequent errors in verb forms, articles, agreement, and clauses reduce control.
Correct basic patterns such as happiness comes, even if they have, and every person before attempting more complex structures.
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IELTS Writing Task 2
Most people agree that money cannot bring happiness. Why is happiness difficult to define? How can people achieve happiness?
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.