IELTS:Who should be responsible for cleaning pollution? Private Individuals or Government?

Hi guys,

Please help for my IELTS writing and I hope to get your feedback.

Thanks a lot!

Topic: some people argue that companies and private individuals, not government, should pay the bill of environmental pollution cleaning up. To what extent do you agree or disagree.

As we all known, the main duty of government is to improve citizen's living standards. Therefore, some people maintain that it is the government that should be responsible for eliminating the pollution to promote our living condition. Instead of the government, however, I would argue that companies and individuals should be charged for the payment of cleaning pollution up.

The major reason is that the payment from companies and individuals can effectively help to get rid of pollution. Companies and individuals have to change their environmentally unfriendly ways of operating and living to be greener, if the payment for cleaning takes a main part of their incomes. For example, in some countries, such as China, manufacturing companies are asked for paying plenty of money to eliminate the negative effects of industrial wasted gases. So they have already improved their manufacturing methods with less wasted gases emission. As a consequent, the air pollution in industrial areas has been better than before.

Although the government gains the amount of tax revenue from companies and citizens, it can hardly afford the expense on solving the environmental problems. Except eliminating pollution there are a great number of more important issues, such starvation and poverty, needed to be solved by the government. Especially in some developing and less developed countries, the government there has to spend their revenue purchasing food and building infrastructure to make their people survive and be far away from poverty. Therefore, the government is unable to eliminate pollution by paying a lot of money.

In conclusion, I believe that companies and individuals should pay for eliminating pollution, but the government also has the duty to make appropriate policies to lead their people to work and live in a green way.

As we all know


Your prompt argues the other way round;


Some people maintain the view that private companies and individuals should be responsible for keeping the environment clean and it is not a responsibility of the government.

Also, I find the prompt you have included here has many grammar errors and therefore it is very difficult to understand what it really means :(

As dumi said, the first part of your prompt is not written properly to convey what it really does expect. However, I assume it suggests that private companies and individuals are responsible for bearing the cost of cleaning the environment. It is the word "pollution" that confuses us :D


.... What you are suggesting is that when companies and individuals are made to pay for cleaning, then they would feel the gravity of polluting the environment and therefore they would keep away from those activities that pollute the environment. This is a good justification, but you have expressed only a part of it. You need to tell the reader the whole story as to how it happens, otherwise the reader may not understand your reasoning.