IELTS General Training Writing Study Guide

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to complain about a washing machine that I purchased from your Riverside branch on 14 August, and to request a replacement.

The machine is a Bexley 8 kg front-loading model, and it cost 429 pounds. Your delivery team installed it the following morning, and for the first two weeks it worked without any problems.

Since then, however, the drum has begun to make a loud grinding noise during every spin cycle, and on two occasions the door has refused to unlock at the end of a wash. Last Sunday the machine stopped halfway through a cycle and left several litres of water on my kitchen floor. I have already telephoned your customer service line twice, but nobody has called me back.

As the machine is less than two months old and still under warranty, I would like you to collect it and deliver a replacement within the next ten days. I have attached a copy of my receipt.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully,
V. Sriram

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to ask the council to improve the pedestrian crossing on Mill Lane, outside Hawthorn Primary School.

The crossing is a zebra crossing with no lights, just after a sharp bend. Drivers coming from the town centre cannot see it until they are almost on top of it, and many of them are travelling well above the 30 mph limit. On school mornings, around two hundred children use this crossing within twenty minutes.

Since the start of term I have witnessed three near misses, and last Tuesday a delivery van stopped inches from a mother and her pushchair. Parents now wait at the kerb in groups and step out together in the hope that drivers will notice them.

I would urge the council to install traffic lights at the crossing and to place a flashing school warning sign before the bend. A speed camera on this stretch of road would also help.

I would be grateful for a written reply explaining what action the council intends to take.

Yours faithfully,
V. Sriram

Dear Priya,

Great news about the new job! I hope the move is not causing you too much stress.

You asked me to recommend an area, and my suggestion is Northgate. It is about fifteen minutes from the city centre on the tram, so you could get to your office without a car. Most of the housing is older terraced houses that have been split into flats, and rents are lower than in the centre.

The area would suit you well. There is a big park at the end of the high street where you could run in the mornings, and there are three or four decent cafés and a weekend market. It is also quiet at night, which I know matters to you after your last flat.

I have a free weekend at the end of the month, so I can drive you round to look at places, and I am happy to carry boxes on moving day.

Write back and tell me what you decide.

Love,
Vineet

Hi Daniel,

It was lovely to see you last weekend, and I am glad you are finally going to learn to cook.

The course I took was the beginners’ evening class at the Old Bakery on Station Road. It runs on Tuesday evenings for eight weeks, and each session lasts about two and a half hours. There were only ten of us, so the tutor, Marta, had plenty of time for everyone.

We started with knife skills and basic sauces and then moved on to a different dish each week, from fresh pasta to a full roast dinner. By the end I could plan a meal for six people without panicking, and I still use her recipe for lentil curry most weeks.

I recommend it because Marta is patient and funny, and you take home everything you cook, so you get dinner for the price of the class. The next course starts in October, and places go fast.

Tell me if you decide to sign up and I will send you the booking link.

All the best,
Vineet

Many children leave school able to solve equations but unable to read a payslip or compare two loans. I agree completely that schools should teach money management, because it is a skill every adult needs and because families cannot be relied on to teach it.

The first reason is that handling money is one of the few subjects that every pupil will use for the rest of their life. Whatever job a person ends up doing, they will have to budget for rent, understand the interest on a credit card and decide how much to save. In the UK, for example, a survey by a debt charity found that people under twenty-five were the group most likely to miss a repayment, and most of them said that nobody had ever explained how compound interest works. A few hours of lessons on budgeting and borrowing during secondary school would prevent a great deal of this trouble.

The second reason is that leaving this task to parents produces unequal results. Children whose parents run a business or work in finance pick up these ideas at the dinner table, while children of parents who struggle with debt often inherit the same habits. When my own school ran a short programme in which pupils managed a mock budget for a month, the pupils who gained most were those who had never had a bank account explained to them at home. Schools are the only place where every child, regardless of background, can receive the same grounding.

Overall, I strongly agree that money management belongs in the school curriculum. It is a skill everyone needs, and teaching it in the classroom gives every child the same chance to learn it.

Since many companies discovered during the pandemic that work could carry on outside the office, there has been a lively debate about whether staff should stay at home or return to their desks. This essay looks at both positions and argues that home working should be allowed for most roles, as long as teams still meet in person on a regular basis.

Supporters of office work point out that ideas and skills spread most easily when people share a room. A junior employee learns by overhearing how a senior colleague handles a difficult phone call, and problems are often solved in a quick conversation by the coffee machine rather than in a scheduled video call. A software company I know of found that its new recruits took almost twice as long to become productive when they were trained entirely online, and it now asks all staff with under two years of service to attend the office three days a week.

Those who favour working from home argue that it removes the wasted hours of commuting and lets people work when they are at their most alert. My sister, an accountant, saved ninety minutes a day when her firm allowed remote working, and she used that time to exercise and to finish her reports before her children woke up. Her firm also reported lower staff turnover, because parents and carers who might otherwise have resigned were able to keep their jobs.

In my view, the second position is stronger for most jobs, because the gains in time and wellbeing are large and measurable, while the benefits of the office can be kept by requiring a few shared days each week.

Overall, although the office has real advantages for training, the balance favours letting people work from home, with regular days in the office to protect teamwork.

Roughly a third of the food produced in wealthy countries ends up in the bin. The main causes are supermarket practices that encourage people to buy more than they need and widespread confusion about date labels, and the most effective solutions are changes to the way food is sold and labelled.

Supermarkets bear much of the responsibility because their business model depends on abundance. Shelves are kept full until closing time so that customers never see an empty space, and multi-buy offers push shoppers to take home three bags of salad when they will only eat one. At the same time, most people cannot tell the difference between a “best before” date, which is about quality, and a “use by” date, which is about safety, so perfectly good yoghurt and bread are thrown away on the morning the label expires. A study in Britain found that households discarded around a fifth of everything they bought, and the largest single category was fresh produce that had gone past its date unopened.

The solutions follow from the causes. Governments can require shops to donate unsold food to charities instead of destroying it, as France did in 2016, and can ban multi-buy promotions on fresh goods. Labels should be simplified so that only food that could cause illness carries a use-by date, while everything else carries none at all. Several British retailers have already removed dates from fruit and vegetables and report that customers now judge freshness by looking and smelling, which is what previous generations always did.

In short, food is wasted because it is sold in excess and labelled in a confusing way. Shops that donate rather than dump, and labels that only warn of real danger, would cut the problem substantially.

Online shopping has grown from a novelty into the way many people buy everything from groceries to furniture. Although it has damaged town centres and encouraged impulsive spending, I am convinced that its advantages for ordinary consumers outweigh these drawbacks.

The clearest disadvantage is the effect on high streets. When shoppers order from home, local businesses lose the passing trade that kept them open, and empty shopfronts make town centres less pleasant for everyone. In my home town, for instance, the department store that had anchored the main street for eighty years closed in 2022, and the bookshop and café next to it followed within a year. A second problem is that buying with one click makes it easy to spend money without thinking, and returns of unwanted items generate large amounts of packaging and transport.

Against this, the benefits are considerable. Online stores give people in small towns and rural areas access to the same range of goods and the same prices as people in big cities, and they allow customers to compare dozens of sellers in minutes rather than walking between shops. For people with limited mobility, this is more than a convenience. My grandmother, who can no longer drive, now orders her weekly groceries online and has them delivered to her kitchen table, which has allowed her to stay in her own home. Delivery to the door also replaces thousands of individual car journeys, so the environmental picture is less one-sided than it first appears.

To conclude, online shopping has hurt town centres and encourages careless spending, but the choice and independence it gives to consumers, especially those who cannot easily reach a shop, mean that its advantages outweigh its disadvantages.

Workers who once expected to spend a whole career with one employer are now likely to move on every three or four years. This shift has two main causes, the decline of long-term job security and the rise of online recruitment, and on balance I regard it as a positive development.

The first cause is that companies stopped offering loyalty before employees did. Final-salary pensions, guaranteed promotion and the expectation of a job for life have largely disappeared, and workers have responded by treating each job as a temporary arrangement. The second cause is that changing jobs has become far easier. Twenty years ago, finding a new position meant scanning newspaper advertisements and posting letters, whereas today a recruiter can contact a professional through a networking website before that person has even applied. A friend of mine who works in marketing has received three unsolicited offers in the last year alone, each one paying more than her current salary.

Frequent moves are positive for the individual and for the economy as a whole. Employees who move gain a wider range of skills and, in most industries, earn considerably more than those who stay, since pay rises within a company rarely match the jump that comes with a new offer. Employers, meanwhile, have to compete for staff by improving pay and conditions rather than relying on habit to keep them. The main drawback is that firms become reluctant to train people who might leave, but the answer to that is for firms to give people reasons to stay.

To conclude, young people change jobs more often because the old guarantees have gone and new opportunities are easy to find. Since this rewards skill and pushes employers to treat staff better, it is a change for the better.