【答案解析】Prompt
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?
The extended family ( grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles ) is less important now than it was in the past.
Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
Topic Notes
This topic asks you to compare the importance of extended family now and in the past. If you agree with the statement, you might want to discuss factors that have caused this to happen such as family members having to move far distances away from their hometown for their jobs. If you disagree with the statement, you might support your answer by explaining that in certain parts of the world, it is still very common for extended family members to play important roles in one another"s day-to-day lives, and you might describe how this works. No matter which position you take, it is fine to include your personal opinion about the effects of changes over time to the importance of the extended family (for example, many writers comment that this change has generally been bad for society); that is appropriate for this task, as long as it is part of a well-developed response that includes sufficient explanation and details.
Sample Response
I agree with the statement that the extended family has become less important than it was before. In the past, there were the threats of bombings in the cold war or money depressions that place higher important on sticking and working together. However, there has been a change in the values of our world today that have severed many important relations between family members.
First, with new technology, older generations of grandparents and some aunts and uncles may be separated into a different world. One example is instant messaging and email; most young people use these ways to talk constantly with friends and other people, and consider this more exciting and important than talking with extended family members.
Also, students today are becoming more and more busy with school, after school activities, and homework. High achieving students take numerous advanced classes, overload on homework, and have little time to spend time with the other members of the family. Other children are constantly involved in after school sports and activities that take up most of their time. Because of the more importance placed on good grades, better test scores, and after school activities, the significance of the extended family has been decreasing.
Finally, families are becoming farther apart because of distance. Gone are the times in which families lived close together or in the same house, and have evenings with quality family times. In my case, I live halfway across the planet from the rest of my family and only get a few moments to talk on the phone with them every few months and a few weeks together during school vacation. Some other family members live so far away that I rarely get to talk to them, let alone meet them.
Therefore, the extended family has become less important because other values and factors have come into place. There is less communication going between them, less time to spend together, and more distance to travel to be with them. Extended family members have become quite separated from the rest of the family than in the past.
Rater Comments
The writer of this 5-level response agrees with the idea that extended family has become less important, and provides three reasons for this: widespread use of technology, busy lives of family members, and the distances separating family members. Each one of those points is well developed, and includes appropriate details and explanations; for the first point, specific types of technology and how people use them are referenced, for the second point, there is an explanation of how or in what ways children are busy these days, and for the third point, a personal example illustrates the idea that family members living far apart makes staying in touch harder.
The organization is good and transitional sentences are used appropriately ("However, there has been a change..."). Throughout the response there are many examples of appropriate word choice, syntactic variety, and idiomaticity. Grammatical and lexical errors (for example, "families are becoming farther apart" instead of, perhaps, "families are growing farther apart") are very few and minor, and they do not interfere with meaning.