IELTS essay: Living in villages has both pros and cons

Advantages and disadvantages of living in a small community

In the old days, people preferred living in a small community to a large one, yet urban areas are becoming more congested day by day. It means the minor did bring them more benefits than the major in the past, but drawbacks make it no longer populated.

On the one hand, there are some advantages which were suitable for the old lifestyle. Firstly, one of the features of living in villages that is still accurate until now is its healthy environment. Pollution has never been a concern because of the fresh air and the peaceful atmosphere. Secondly, people in rural areas had an extremely close relationship. Since there were a few people in a village, everyone knew each other, and solidarity which was highly promoted by the former society was noticeable. Whenever someone had a problem, there were always people who willingly gave a hand.

On the other hand, some disadvantages created many difficulties in daily life, which is why the low population density in the countryside. Firstly, there is short of equipment and it is usually old-fashioned. This results in underdevelopment that happened in different fields such as IT, education, health, entertainment, and so on. The countryside is isolated from the other parts of the world as the news was not timely updated which is intensely serious since information is needed to prevent a disaster. Moreover, poor conditions led to backward thinking and ignorance of the citizens. This is because they live in a community with traditions instead of adapting cultures like in the big city.

In short, although living in villages has both pros and cons, drawbacks have created a strong impact on modern life that makes it no longer be an ideal place to live in. Especially, when the pandemic is spreading, health care services playing an important role are mostly supplied in cities.

Your prompt restatement does not make a clear connection with the original prompt. The original discussion simply stated that the discussion is to be based on a a general discussion regarding the advantages and disadvantages of living in a small community. The writer is not being asked to perform any assessment of the topics that could lead to a presentation of a personal opinion. Rather than a personal opinion, the last part of the first paragraph should only state one advantage sentence topic and one disadvantage sentence topic. Based on the prompt restatement + response guidelines, the writer failed to properly represent the original prompt.

The discussion patterns of the writer are acceptable. However, the cohesiveness of the paragraphs need to be better developed to increase the C+C score that is reliant of the proper connection between reason 1 and reason 2 in a paragraph. For example, the focal point of the first reasoning paragraph is pollution. Therefore, the second reason should indicate the relationship of pollution with the small community. This would be a greater disadvantage representation since it will clearly connect the small community discussion to the anchor topic.


You cannot use a numerical ordinal in a paragraph if there is no series that follows it. You need not always count or numerically list your reasons. You can just discuss the topics directly and use connecting phrases instead. Build your transition words, phrases, and sentences abilities to further increase your GRA score.

This is not an opinion essay but a general discussion. Therefore, the writer's personal opinion should not be reflected anywhere in the presentation.Not in the introduction, not in the conclusion. This is a direct prompt alteration that will have negative scoring results for the writer in the end.