Task
Follow-up discussion on work.
- Do you think people are working longer hours than in the past?
- Why do some jobs pay far more than others?
- Should companies be responsible for their employees' wellbeing?
Task
The first question contains an assumption. You are allowed to reject it — examiners reward candidates who question a premise rather than accepting it and answering the easy version.
Model answer(236 words)
Do you think people are working longer hours than in the past?
Measured in hours, probably not — the figures for most developed countries have been falling slowly for a century. What has changed is that work has become harder to leave. A factory shift ended when you walked out of the building; a job with a phone in your pocket doesn't, and I suspect that's what people are actually reporting when they say they work more.
Why do some jobs pay far more than others?
Partly scarcity, partly bargaining power, and the second explains more than people usually allow. Surgeons are paid well because few people can do it, which is the intuitive answer. But nurses are also hard to replace and are paid a fraction as much, so scarcity alone plainly isn't sufficient. The difference is largely how organised a profession is and how easily it can withhold its labour.
Should companies be responsible for their employees' wellbeing?
For the parts they create, yes — and I'd draw the line there. If a company sets workloads that make people ill, that is straightforwardly its responsibility, and offering a meditation app instead of fixing the workload is a way of relabelling a structural problem as a personal one. What I'd resist is the broader version, where the employer becomes responsible for an employee's whole life. That tends to serve the company more than the worker.
Why this answer scores well
The first answer refuses the premise, which is the highest-value move available in Part 3. "Measured in hours, probably not" contradicts the question and then explains what the questioner is probably actually observing. That is engaging with the idea rather than supplying content on demand, and Band 8 descriptors reward exactly this.
The second answer builds an argument in three steps: give the intuitive explanation, produce a counter-example that breaks it, then offer a better explanation. The nurses comparison is doing real analytical work — it is not decoration.
The third answer draws an explicit boundary and defends both sides of it. "Offering a meditation app instead of fixing the workload is a way of relabelling a structural problem as a personal one" is a genuinely sharp observation, expressed precisely.
Lexical Resource: "bargaining power", "withhold its labour", "relabelling", "straightforwardly". Note "than people usually allow" — an idiomatic use of *allow* that is difficult to produce without real fluency.
Grammatical Range: present perfect continuous ("have been falling"), a cleft ("What has changed is that"), fronted conditionals, and a fronted comparative in the closing. Complex forms appear because the ideas need them, not as display.
The hedging is doing work too: "probably not", "I suspect", "I'd resist". Confident answers in Part 3 are less convincing than considered ones.
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