Guides / Task 2 topics
Recent IELTS Writing Task 2 Questions, Sorted by Theme
Every few weeks a new list appears under a title like "recent IELTS Task 2 questions". Candidates copy the list and then try to prepare an answer for every line on it. That is the wrong unit of preparation. The exact sentence almost never comes back, but the theme behind it comes back constantly.
There are roughly nine themes in Task 2. Once you can sort a question into its theme, most of your preparation is already done, because the ideas, the examples and the vocabulary are shared by every question inside that theme. This page sorts the wordings that keep appearing in recall lists into those nine themes, and says what to prepare for each one.
Where these lists come from
They are written from memory. A candidate leaves the test centre and writes down what they remember of the prompt. Nobody outside the test board confirms the wording, so treat every list, including the wordings on this page, as a reconstruction rather than a copy.
That matters in one practical way. If you memorise an answer to a reconstructed wording, and a slightly different wording appears on the day, you will answer the question you remember instead of the question that is printed. Task Response, the criterion that asks whether you answered the question set, is where that costs the most marks. Use lists for themes. Never use them for answers.
The nine themes
| Theme | What the question asks you to judge | A wording that keeps appearing |
|---|---|---|
| Education | How children and young adults should be taught | Should schools teach practical skills instead of academic subjects? |
| Environment | Who is responsible for damage, and what fixes it | Is individual action or government action more effective against pollution? |
| Technology | What a new tool replaces, and at what cost | Has communication technology made relationships weaker? |
| Work and career | How people spend their working lives | Should employees be allowed to work from home permanently? |
| Health | Prevention against treatment, and who pays | Should governments spend more on prevention than on hospitals? |
| Crime and punishment | The purpose of a sentence | Is prison an effective way to reduce crime? |
| Public spending | How limited money should be divided | Should public money fund the arts, or only essential services? |
| Globalisation and culture | What is gained and lost when cultures meet | Does global tourism harm local traditions? |
| Family and society | Changing roles inside families and communities | Should elderly people be cared for by their families or by the state? |
Nine themes covers most of what appears. A question that seems to be outside them is usually one theme seen from an unusual angle, and you can normally place it with the method below.
Sorting a question in thirty seconds
A Task 2 prompt has two separate parts, and candidates often read them as one. The first part is the statement, which carries the topic. The second part is the instruction, which sets the shape of your answer: agree or disagree, discuss both views, advantages and disadvantages, or a two part question.
Sort them separately.
- Underline the noun that carries the topic. In "some people believe governments should fund public transport rather than roads", that noun is public transport. The theme is public spending.
- Read the instruction on its own. It tells you the paragraph plan, not the content. The plans themselves are set out in recent Task 2 question shapes and in Task 2 questions by type.
- Pull your prepared ideas from the theme, then shape them with the instruction.
Doing this in the exam takes under a minute and removes the worst kind of panic, which is the feeling that you have nothing to say about a topic you have never thought about.
What to prepare for each theme
For each theme, prepare two ideas general enough to fit almost any question inside it, and a small set of precise words. Two ideas are enough, because a Task 2 body paragraph needs one idea developed properly, not four ideas listed.
| Theme | Two ideas that travel | Words worth having ready |
|---|---|---|
| Education | Schools shape future earnings; class time is a fixed budget | curriculum, vocational, literacy, streaming, rote learning |
| Environment | Costs fall on people who did not cause them; regulation moves faster than habit | emissions, incentive, subsidy, landfill, enforcement |
| Technology | Every tool replaces a skill; convenience has a privacy price | automation, surveillance, obsolete, screen time, bandwidth |
| Work and career | Productivity is not the same as hours worked; security enables risk | commute, flexible hours, burnout, retraining, contract |
| Health | Prevention is cheaper than cure; behaviour is hard to legislate | obesity, screening, public health, sedentary, waiting list |
| Crime | Punishment has three aims that conflict; deterrence depends on being caught | rehabilitation, deterrent, reoffend, sentencing, community service |
| Public spending | Money spent here is not spent there; some goods only governments will fund | infrastructure, taxpayer, allocate, funding, priority |
| Globalisation | Exchange runs both ways; scale destroys small producers | heritage, multinational, authentic, imported, local economy |
| Family and society | Family structures follow economics; care work is unpaid work | ageing population, household, dependent, generation, informal care |
Those words are ordinary and precise, which is what Lexical Resource rewards. It does not reward rare words used incorrectly. A candidate who writes "the government should allocate funding to preventative screening" is scoring better than one who reaches for an unusual word and misuses it.
One theme, one worked paragraph
Question: Some people think governments should spend money on public transport rather than on new roads. To what extent do you agree?
Theme: public spending. Shape: single opinion. Here is one body paragraph.
I agree mainly because the two kinds of spending do not solve the same problem. A new road increases capacity for a few years, after which the extra capacity attracts more drivers and the congestion returns. Investment in buses and rail changes how people travel rather than how fast they queue. In cities where a rail line has opened, the effect on the road network lasts longer than the effect of widening a road, because the number of journeys moved is permanent.
Read what that paragraph is doing. It begins with a position, not with a general truth about transport. It develops one idea across four sentences instead of listing three. The link words are inside the sentences, in words like "after which" and "because", rather than sitting at the front as a label, which is what Coherence and Cohesion rewards. The vocabulary is drawn from the theme list above, so nothing in it had to be invented under time pressure.
Themes are preparation, not scripts
There is a line between preparing ideas and memorising sentences. Prepared ideas are rewritten every time to fit the question in front of you. Memorised sentences arrive unchanged, they rarely fit the exact wording, and an answer built mostly from them reads as an answer to a different question. Memorised phrases in IELTS writing covers what this looks like on the page.
What to do today
Take any list of recent questions you already have. Do not answer them. Instead, sort ten of them into the nine themes, and mark which theme appears most often in your list. Then write two ideas for the three themes you are weakest on, and one body paragraph for each, using the paragraph above as the model.
When you have a full answer written under exam conditions, you can paste it into Bandly for an estimated band on each of the four criteria, with the sentences that shaped each estimate highlighted, so you can see whether your prepared ideas actually survived contact with the question.
Find out what this essay would score
Paste your own answer and Bandly returns an estimated band for each of the four criteria, with the sentences that pulled the score down. Under a cent an essay, about six seconds.
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