IELTS Opinion Essay Topics With Full Answers

A list of opinion essay topics is easy to find and hard to use. You read twenty questions, feel prepared, then sit down to write one and discover that knowing the topic was never the difficult part.

What you need next to the question is an answer, and next to the answer the reasoning: which sentence does the work, and which sentence is filler that a marker will read past. This page has twelve questions, one complete answer, and that reasoning written out.

An opinion essay is the Task 2 question type that asks what you think. It appears as "To what extent do you agree or disagree?", as "Do you agree?", or as a statement followed by "What is your opinion?". You write at least 250 words in about 40 minutes.

Twelve opinion essay questions

These follow the themes that recur in the exam. Each one states a position and asks you to respond to it, which is the defining shape of this type.

The decision you make before writing

Every one of those questions gives you three possible positions: agree, disagree, or partly agree. All three can reach a high band, but the third is where candidates lose marks, because "it depends" is easy to write and hard to argue.

Task Response is the criterion at stake. It expects a clear position held from the introduction to the conclusion. A partial agreement is a clear position only if you say exactly what you agree with and exactly what you do not, in the introduction, and then keep that division for the whole essay. If your first body paragraph argues one way, your second argues the other, and your conclusion says both sides have a point, you have written a discussion essay in answer to an opinion question. That is the single most expensive mistake in this question type.

Decide in the first two minutes. Write the position down. Do not change it halfway.

A complete answer to question 3

The question: Governments should invest in public transport rather than in building new roads. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

I strongly agree that public transport deserves the larger share of transport spending, although road maintenance cannot be neglected entirely. The main reason is that building roads does not solve congestion for long. New capacity makes driving cheaper in time and effort, so more people choose to drive, and within a few years the widened road carries the same queues as before. Transport planners have a name for this, induced demand, and it explains why cities that have spent decades widening roads still report worsening traffic. Money spent on a bus network does not have that self-defeating quality, because a bus that fills up can be followed by another bus rather than by another lane of concrete. A second argument concerns who benefits. Road spending helps only those who own a car, and car ownership tracks income closely. Public transport serves students, older people, low income workers and anyone who cannot drive, which is a far larger group. Where public money is limited, spending it on the transport most citizens can actually use is the fairer choice. There is a reasonable objection. Rural communities are too thinly populated for frequent buses or trains, and for them a well maintained road is not a luxury. I accept this, and it is why I would not remove road funding completely. The argument is about priority rather than exclusivity: repair the roads that exist, and put new money into services that move many people at once. In conclusion, I agree that public transport should take priority, because road building tends to recreate the problem it was meant to fix and because buses and trains serve a wider section of the population. Roads still need maintaining, but that is a different claim from building more of them.

That is 286 words, which is comfortably over the 250 minimum without being so long that accuracy suffers.

Why the answer is written that way

The position appears in the first sentence. Not in the second paragraph, not after a general statement about the modern world. Task Response asks for a clear position, and the cheapest way to show one is to state it immediately.

Each body paragraph makes one claim and then explains the mechanism. Paragraph two does not stop at "new roads do not help". It says why: cheaper driving, more drivers, same queues. That extra step is what the descriptors mean by an extended and supported idea.

The counter argument is answered, not just mentioned. Paragraph four concedes the rural case and then narrows the claim to priority rather than exclusivity. Conceding a point and keeping your position is a strong Task Response move; conceding a point and quietly changing sides is the weak one.

The linking is carried by the ideas. There is no Firstly, no Moreover, no In conclusion until the actual conclusion. Coherence and Cohesion rewards connections the reader does not have to notice.

The vocabulary is exact rather than long. "Induced demand", "self-defeating", "thinly populated" are precise. Lexical Resource is measuring whether the word you chose is the right one, and a long word used slightly wrongly costs more than a plain word used correctly.

Estimating where an answer sits

If you want a number against your own attempt at any of the twelve questions above, Bandly will give you an estimated band for each of the four criteria with the sentences that drove each estimate highlighted. The bands are machine estimates and have not been checked against a qualified human examiner, so read the highlighted sentences before the numbers. The value is in seeing which sentence a marker would stop at, and that part you can act on straight away.

Start with question 3 or question 10, write for forty minutes on a clock, and change only one thing afterwards: make the position in your first sentence unmistakable.