It is generally believed that some people are born with certain talents, for instance for sports or music, and others are not. However, it is sometimes claimed that any child can be taught to become a good sports person or musician. Discuss both these views and give your own opinion.
Sample Response
People have differing opinions as to what makes a high achiever. Some believe that a person has got to possess certain innate traits to become an excellent performer while the other school of thought is that anyone can become an excellent performer if they are taughtif being taught in thea right way. I tend to supportgravitate towards the latter school of thought.
Firstly, we have to admit that in certain realms in life, to achieve greatness, you have got to have the right genetics, to illustrate,to illustrate; a shorter person will always be at a disadvantage against a taller person in basketball. Secondly, many children display phenomenal qualities inat sports and music that it wouldn’t be irrational to believe that they were born with these characteristics, enabling them to excel in their chosen fields.
However, I strongly believe that talent is often overemphasisedmassively overhyped in our culture. If we examine the lives of top performers in any field such as Tiger Woods in golfGolf or Mozart in music, we realisemusic, we would realise that these people didn’t have any inborn attributes that we normally associate with geniuses. In fact,What in fact happens is that such people normally are exposed to the areas that they would grow up to excel in, later in their lives, from a very youngtender age. The idea of a child prodigy is often more complex than it appearsThere is indeed no such thing as a child prodigy which is evident from biographies of almost all of highly recognised top performers. In addition, these people spend a painstaking amount of time perfecting their acts whether be it symphonies or a particular kind of move in sports.
To conclude, in spite of the fact that most people believe that talent is inborn, I beg to differ with this notion and believe that as long as the trait in question is not purely physical, like height, any child or person can become a top performer in their chosen domain with enough time spent in practice.
[WrittenWriten by - Sameed ]
Why this response received Band 7.0
The response clearly discusses both perspectives, maintains a strong position, and uses relevant examples to develop the contrast between natural ability and training. Its main weakness is that several claims about prodigies and practice are overly absolute, while some long links and informal wording reduce precision; qualify those claims with balanced evidence and tighten the phrasing so the argument remains persuasive and academically controlled.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Response
The response addresses both views, presents a clear opinion, and develops a relevant argument with examples, though a few claims are too absolute and could be better qualified.
Keep the strong position but qualify broad claims about prodigies and training with more balanced wording.
Coherence and Cohesion
Paragraphing is logical and progression is clear, with effective contrast between natural traits and training; some sentence links are slightly heavy or awkward.
Use fewer long linking phrases and make the central contrast explicit in each body paragraph topic sentence.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is flexible and topic-specific, with some strong phrases, but a few choices are informal, exaggerated, or misspelled.
Replace informal or extreme expressions with precise academic wording and proofread final details.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
A range of complex structures is used successfully, although there are occasional punctuation, article, and clause-pattern errors.
Edit long sentences for punctuation and use more controlled relative clauses when explaining examples.
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IELTS Writing Task 2
It is generally believed that some people are born with certain talents, for instance for sports or music, and others are not. However, it is sometimes claimed that any child can be taught to become a good sports person or musician. Discuss both these views and give your own opinion.
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.