IELTS writing task 2: Early job to pay for retirement

Topic: The increase in people's life expectancy means that they have to work older to pay for their retirement. One alternative is that people start to work at a younger age. Is this alternative a positive or negative development?

My try:

starting work at an earlier age

It is a fact that the more people live a longer life, the more of them need to work for a number of extra years to contribute to the retirement fund. Many advocate another viable option which suggests that these people should start working earlier, but I totally disagree with this notion.

The first justification is that working as soon as possible may pose a threat to the development of young people. It is common sense that children need a certain period of time to grow properly as well as gain a standardized level of education. Seeking a job early, therefore, may have various negative impacts on both mental and physical health of the youths, such as back problems and chronic stress when they become older. This will eventually be a heavy burden for the government because it has to allocate more funds to medical system to support their treatment. Another potential danger is that these employees cannot master adequate knowledge and useful skills to work with high efficiency and effectiveness.

Meanwhile, the solution of allowing old people to continue their working life for a handful of years seems to have more benefits. People in contemporary society receive better health-care services than their ancestors did and it is realistic that they can maintain their competitive abilities in the workplace for years. Some may hold the believe that it is not fair to force elderly people to work after many years of working but this assumption is somehow fallacious because many seniors express their happiness realizing that they can still contribute to the welfare of the society. For this reason, I would support the viewpoint of working longer.

In conclusion, it seems to me that starting work at an earlier age has overall unfavorable outcomes in comparison with working more in the old age.

Please feel free to comment. Thank you all in advance.

Sarah, you just got a score of 1 in this essay. Your response is completely unrelated to the task provided by the prompt. You were given a specific instruction. Discuss whether the proposal of having people start working at a younger age is a positive or negative development. You were not being asked for the "extent of your agreement or disagreement with the given statement." Since obviously did not understand the instructions for the discussion, the examiner will have no choice but to fail you in the Task Accuracy section. Once you fail the TA section, you have failed the whole test. Notice how you were supposed to choose either a positive or negative discussion for the essay but instead, you are presenting justifications for a personal opinion. That is not the requirement of the essay. As such, your work in the remaining sections (LR, C&C, GRA) will not longer be considered. Since you gave a wrong response from the very start, it would be useless to assess your remaining abilities because they do not represent the prompt discussion requirements. Make sure you understand the required discussion format before you start to draft your response. Ask for explanations if you are not sure about how to approach the essay discussion. I hope to see an improvement in this portion of your next practice essay.