It is said that taxpayers’ money should be allocated to promote a healthy lifestyle rather than to focus on treating patients. I completely agree with the statement, for disease prevention is cheaper, and being healthy is always better than being hospitalised. Knowing how to lead a healthy life is more cost-effective than paying money to cure a particular disease. For instance, the cost of a balanced diet containing fundamental nutrients in the form of fresh ingredients such as meat, fish and vegetables is even the underprivileged. In contrast, the expenditure on such as cancer or diabetes may be as high as thousands or even millions of dollars, which is a fortune for the majority of people. Therefore, rather than spending a huge sum of money on treatment, a healthy lifestyle, which is much less expensive, is deemed a wiser investment. Additionally, it is more comfortable to be fit and healthy than to stay in a hospital ward surrounded by drugs and medical devices. In fact, maintaining positive habits of eating well and doing physical exercises, despite taking a decent amount of time and effort at , yields more desirable results than spending parts of one’s life or heavily dependent on medical treatments. For example, no one would have to suffer from costly hours of painful chemotherapy if they are able to by leading a healthy lifestyle. In conclusion, it is my firm conviction that prevention is always better than cure, and therefore promoting a healthy way of living is . Tackling the upstream causes of ill health is the core principle of any person’s overall well-being.
Spending Public Money on Health Prevention Versus Treatment
Some people think it is more important to spend public money on promoting a healthy lifestyle in order to prevent illness than to spend it on the treatment for people who are already ill. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
Annotated response
7 correction notes
Overall assessment
Why this response received Band 7.0
The response maintains a clear preference for prevention and develops relevant arguments about cost and quality of life. Its vocabulary and organisation generally support clear communication. The main weakness is overstatement: the chemotherapy example assumes healthy habits can prevent all such illness, and access to affordable nutritious food is treated too broadly. Minor grammatical and collocational slips also reduce precision.
IELTS criteria
How each score was decided
Task Response
7.0A clear position favouring prevention is supported by arguments about cost and quality of life. However, the claim that nobody would need chemotherapy after adopting healthy habits overstates what prevention can achieve, and affordable healthy food is also treated too universally.
Coherence and Cohesion
7.0Ideas progress logically across well-organised paragraphs with a clear position, effective cohesive devices, and appropriate concluding links, with only minor mechanical use of connectors.
Lexical Resource
7.0Vocabulary is sufficiently flexible and precise, including less common items such as 'incipient', 'expenditure' and 'upstream causes', with only occasional awkward collocations like 'costly hours of painful chemotherapy'.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
7.0Complex sentences and subordinate clauses are generally well controlled and the argument is easy to follow. Minor slips include the missing article in 'within financial capacity'. Some long sentences would benefit from tighter construction, but errors do not usually obscure meaning.