IELTS agree or disagree essay - band 9 guide

This is a band 9 guide to writing agree/disagree essays in IELTS Writing. Agree or disagree essay questions are very common for IELTS Writing task 2. This type of questions asks you to say whether you agree or disagree with a given statement and justify your opinion.

In this lesson you will see IELTS writing task 2 sample question + model answer and learn


IELTS agree/disagree question sample

Let’s look at an example of IELTS writing task 2:

Big salary is much more important than job satisfaction.

Do you agree or disagree?

Provide relevant examples if necessary.

This is a classic example of agree or disagree question that you may get on IELTS Writing task 2.

You can watch our video tutorial on how to tackle agree/disagree questions in IELTS Writing:



Choose your opinion & generate ideas

IELTS agree or disagree essay

Agree or disagree question asks you to clearly determine whether you agree or disagree with the statement. Unlike questions that ask you to what extent do you agree or disagree, this question asks you to have a super-clear opinion. After you’ve decided your opinion, generate 2-3 supporting points for it.

For the task above you have two possible options:

  1. You fully agree that big salary is more important than job satisfaction
  2. You completely disagree that big salary is more important than job satisfaction

 Now let’s generate supporting points for each of the opinions:

supporting points for IELTS essay

For our essay, we’ll choose the second opinion.


Band 9 answer structure

After you’ve decided whether you agree or disagree and generated your supporting points, it’s time to start writing your essay.

There are a lot of ways to structure your essay, but we’ll use a structure that has been approved by many IELTS examiners to be high-scoring and coherent.

Band-9 essay structure:

  1. Introduction
  2. Body paragraph 1 - the 1st reason you agree/disagree
  3. Body paragraph 2 - the 2nd reason you agree/disagree
  4. Conclusion

 

Let’s take a look at each of these sections in detail.

Introduction

Write your introduction in two sentences:


Body paragraph 1 - the 1st reason you agree/disagree


Body paragraph 2 - the 2nd reason you agree/disagree


Conclusion

You can write the conclusion in one sentence that summarizes your opinion + 2 reasons for it:

To conclude, I strongly believe that job satisfaction is more beneficial than high salary because it makes people happy and motivated.

DO NOT write new ideas in the conclusion!


IELTS agree/disagree model answer

This is a full band-9 answer for IELTS agree or disagree question above:

It is often argued that it is more advantageous to choose a job with high wage, even if it doesn't appeal to you at all. I completely disagree with this opinion and think that job satisfaction is much more important than salary.

First of all, I believe that job satisfaction gives people a sense of fulfillment that no money can guarantee. Even if someone is earning a high salary, but feels tensed and compromises with his conscience, this person won’t enjoy his life. While pursuing one’s interests will always bring pleasure and feeling of satisfaction. For example, a lot of famous researchers made their career choices not because of appealing wages, but because they were passionate about science. That’s why it’s more important to choose the kind of work that makes you happy than to look only at a high salary.

Secondly, doing what you like keeps you motivated and therefore leads to a career growth. In other words, there is a strong relation between job satisfaction and productivity. People who love their jobs can easily excel in their fields of work and achieve better results than those, who put salary on the first place. For instance, Henry Miller decided to leave his everyday job despite a good wage and ventured to become a writer. And after enduring years of ups and downs he became one of the most famous and well-paid authors of the twentieth century. Thus, advantages of jobs that keep you satisfied outweigh the drawback of a low salary in a long-term perspective.

To conclude, I strongly believe that job satisfaction is more beneficial than high salary because it makes people happy and motivated.

(277 words)