PTE: Over a billion adults legally smoke tobacco. The long term health costs are high - for smokers

Prompt:

Do governments have a legitimate role to legislate to protect citizens from the harmful effects of their own decision to smoke, or are such decisions up to the individuals.

harmful effect of tobacco

My essay:

Tobacco is a popular drug attracting over a billion adults every day, mainly in the form of cigarettes. However, long-term consuming tobacco will harm our health, what is worse, will have negative effect on wider society in terms of health care and lost productivity. Some people argue that smokers should take responsibility to quit smoking in order to protect people from the harmful effects of smoke. In my opinion, it is more of governments' responsibility to legislate to restrict the spread of tobacco use.

Some people believe that smoking is a personal decision, and as long as people are educated and aware of tobacco's harmful effects they will choose to quit smoking. However most smokers are addicted to the smoking habit, and tobacco has become a vital food for them both physically and mentally. Also they doubt the harmful effects as there is no obvious impact can be seen shortly. So it is usually too challenge for people to quit smoking by themselves.

On the other hand, the governments can use legal power to legislate through a range of measures and educate public. Comprehensive tobacco control policies should be established, smoking in public area including workspace should be forbidden, selling to children should be banned, effective health warning on all tobacco products should be a must. At meantime, campaigns to promote healthy life and awareness of tobacco's harmful effects should be run regularly, and keep young generation away from smoking.

In conclusion, harmful effects of tobacco can be eliminated when both the governments and smokers take action immediately. The governments legislate to protect public from smoking damage. and educate people about the negative impact of tobacco, the smokers use will-power to quit smoking more actively.

Hi. I'm not sure about your word limit, but if you don't have one, I think you could develop your essay a bit more.

At the moment, you just have paragraphs detailing how the government can legislate. However, the question asks whether the government has a role in legislating, which really asks two questions: can the government legislate & should the government legislate? I think your argument would be a bit more nuanced if you tackled both perspectives.

Discuss the role of the government with regards to the health of its constituents. Talk about the idea of public vs. private space, and what rights citizens are entitled to in each area. Talk about how smoking/tobacco use is currently framed; is it a choice or an addiction? Wether its the former or the latter, what is the responsibility of the government in addressing the issue? For example, if its a choice, who makes the choice and who is affected by it? the smoker chooses to smoke, but the people he comes in contact with face the repercussions of his smoking through second/third hand smoke, even though they didn't sign up for it. How can the government deal with that conception of choice, that extends beyond the smoker? etc, etc.

Ethan, if I were the examiner scoring this test, the overall score would be 0. Why do I believe that you would fail the test? While it may be open to interpretation, it is my opinion that the prompt was asking you to choose one side of the issue presented for complete discussion, with evidence, in the response essay. What you did was a compare and contrast discussion instead. If you review the prompt, the keyword that tells you that you should be presenting only one side for discussion in the essay is the word "or". Therefore, you were being asked to make a decision and discuss that decision in the essay. Since you did not discuss the essay properly, the response had to be scored 0 in all 7 aspects of scoring.

Thank you very much @reapernanashi & @Polt for the detailed comment! You are right I did not catch the point, I will give it another try.

Hi @reapernanashi , @Polt , Thank you for the helpful comments. The word limit is 200-300. Would you please help review updated one?

It has often been a debate whether it is the responsibility of the governments to protect citizens from the consumption of harmful tobacco or it should be left to the individual to decide by themselves. As far as I am concerned, the governments do have the duty to legislate to protect public from tobacco's harmful effects.

Although smoking is a personal choice, the long term consumption of tobacco is damaging health of not only smokers but also non-smokers who get in contact with them. It is unfair for non-smokers to bear the risk of lung diseases or even cancer caused by second hand smoke. Also in certain places smoking is dangerous and can cause fire disaster, like gas station or forest, people shall not danger public's life by their own habit.

On the other hand, the governments, elected by the people, are granted right and responsibility to guarantee general health of the public and good of the society, and keep people safe. So the governments do have the right to legislate and must legislate in a range of measures, for example, ban smoking in public areas, forbid young people from smoking, enforce health warning on tobacco products, and what else relevant. By doing so, it can not only benefits individual's health and productivity, and also reduces the governments' health cost.

In conclusion, for the good of the society and people's health, the governments do have the legitimate role and must legislate in order to restrict tobacco usage.

I can see that the revised essay is better than the previous one. You have chosen one particular side in order to answer the prompt of the essay. This is what you should do for the next essay practice or the real examination. However, there are some points that need to be revised in order to improve the quality of your essay, particularly in the introduction part. It is much better if you can outline the details of your thesis statement in the introduction paragraph. At least you can mention the general ideas that you are going to explain in the body paragraphs. Therefore, your introduction will not be lack of sentences. As we all know, a strong and well-developed paragraph should consist of at least more than two sentences.

The conclusion part is quite the same. You are not supposed to write only a single sentence like what you've done in the essay. You need to at least paraphrase your introduction paragraph. This would help you create more appropriate conclusion. Also, do not forget to add a recommendation / hope / suggestion in the very last sentence of your conclusion to indicate that you are aware of what would happen in the future.

Hope this helps :)

This is an unbelievable improvement over your first essay Ethan. You definitely showed a clear understanding of the prompt requirement. There was also a clear sense of logical discussion, based on facts and evidence within your line of discussion. While your lexical resource and grammar accuracy has some problems, the paragraphs were still understandable. This in turn, made the essay effective enough to support your stance. My scoring per criteria would be as follows:

Content - 3
Formal Requirement - 2
Development, Structure, and Coherence - 2
Grammar - 1
General Linguistic Range - 0
Vocabulary Range - 1
Spelling - 2

Total Score: 11

Good work so far. You need to work on developing your sentence structures in order to create sentences that follow grammatical rules in a more accurate manner. That should help to further improve your score in the Linguistic range.

Thank you @Holt, without your comments I could not realize how bad my essay was. I will keep practice and learn.

@ichanpants89, Thank you for the helpful comments. Surly it will benefit my future practices :)