IELTS Writing Task 2 Culture and globalisation Essay Topics

Position

Disagree that replacement is the general rule. A layer of shared products sits on top of habits that still organise family life, and the layer is mistaken for the whole because it is what a visitor can see.

Body paragraph 1

Point

Clothes, coffee and a chart song can be the same in two cities while the wedding, the funeral and the weekly meal are not.

Explanation

The visible layer travels because it is sold. The practices that decide who cooks, who inherits, and which day the family must gather do not travel as a download. Calling the layer a single culture confuses a shop window with a household.

Example

Two cousins in different countries wearing the same trainers and still keeping different rules about who may speak at a funeral.

Body paragraph 2

Point

Some local practices do shrink when the shared layer takes the only free evening and the only shop.

Explanation

The claim of replacement is not always fantasy. A language not used at work, a recipe not sold at the nearest shop, a festival that loses its day to a global sale: those are real losses. They are specific. They are not proof that one culture has finished the job.

Example

A midweek market of regional food that emptied after the late shift and a chain supermarket took the same hour.

Conclusion

A shared surface is not a single culture. Worry about the particular practice that lost its hour, not about a replacement that a pair of trainers seems to prove.

Position

Fund the unglamorous costs that a crowd cannot be ticketed for — street closure, insurance, a stage — and let the rest stand or fall by whether people still come.

Body paragraph 1

Point

A festival in a public square has costs that no single spectator can sensibly pay, so a pure market test never happens.

Explanation

The council already pays to close the road for a match. Refusing the same closure for a local calendar, and calling that neutrality, picks the events that arrive with a sponsor. Supporters of funding are often asking for the square, not for a permanent salary for every custom.

Example

A harvest procession that needed the high street closed for two hours, which a private committee could not insure.

Body paragraph 2

Point

A grant that continues after the crowd has gone keeps a performance for the form that approved it.

Explanation

The paying view is a useful warning. If people will not cross the town for the event, public money is producing a report. Traditions change. Funding every version that once existed freezes a list. The test is attendance over a few years, not nostalgia in the application.

Example

A funded fair that moved to a weekday morning to suit the organisers and then cited low turnout as a reason for a larger grant.

Conclusion

Pay for the street and the safety. Stop paying when people stop coming. Neither camp works as an absolute.

Position

Foreign work widens the set of lives a viewer can follow. It thins local production when the only prime-time slots are bought by it.

Body paragraph 1

Point

A series from elsewhere can show an institution — a court, a school, a family argument — that local producers have stopped putting on screen.

Explanation

The advantage is not "understanding other cultures" as a slogan. It is a specific story a person would not otherwise meet, with subtitles that make the meeting possible. Viewers who only ever see their own city mistake its habits for common sense.

Example

A subtitled courtroom series that showed a different way of questioning a witness, watched by people who had never travelled there.

Body paragraph 2

Point

If the cheap imported hour occupies the evening, the local studio never gets the audience that would justify the next series.

Explanation

The disadvantage is a slot, not the existence of the foreign film. Audiences are finite at 9 p.m. A broadcaster that fills that hour with a purchased show, because it is cheaper than making one, trains the next writers to leave. Choice becomes a menu of other people’s industries.

Example

A channel that dropped its only weekly drama in the national language after an imported series cost less per hour and drew the same numbers.

Conclusion

Watch the foreign work. Keep a protected hour for the local one. The advantage and the disadvantage are about the schedule, not about purity.

Position

The cause is that those practices lived in a shared kitchen and a shared evening that many households no longer have. The remedy is a regular, short occasion, not a museum lecture about heritage.

Body paragraph 1

Point

Songs and recipes are passed by repetition beside someone who already knows them, and that hour has been replaced.

Explanation

A grandparent who does not live in the house, a parent who works the evening, and a phone that fills what used to be the washing-up: the transmission fails because the room is empty, not because the young despise the past. A story nobody tells cannot be remembered.

Example

A teenager who could follow a recipe on a video and could not make the festival dish, because nobody in the flat had cooked it beside her.

Body paragraph 2

Point

Schools and community kitchens can put one dish, one song and one story into a fixed week of the year, cooked and sung rather than described.

Explanation

A worksheet about "traditional culture" does not stick. Doing the thing, with an older person paid to attend, does. The solution has to be small enough to repeat. A heritage week that happens once in a school career is a poster.

Example

A yearly afternoon in which a local cook and a class made one festival dish and recorded the story of why the date mattered, then served it.

Conclusion

The knowledge went because the hour went. Put a short hour back, and make it practice rather than a talk.

Position

It happened because a familiar logo reduces the risk of a lease and a traveller’s lunch. It matters when the resemblance replaces the last local shop, and it matters less when it is one unit among many.

Body paragraph 1

Point

A chain can predict the fit-out, the training and the customer’s expectation, so landlords and travellers both prefer it.

Explanation

The independent café is a gamble for a landlord who wants a covenant, and a gamble for a visitor who cannot read the menu. The logo is a promise of a minimum. That commercial logic, repeated, produces the same corner in two countries.

Example

A station unit let to a global coffee brand because the landlord’s lender liked the covenant, after a local café could not offer the same guarantee.

Body paragraph 2

Point

The resemblance matters when the chain takes the site that used to sell the thing you cannot get elsewhere.

Explanation

One familiar shop in a street of others is convenience. A street where every useful shop is a chain has lost the workshop, the regional food and the noticeboard. The test is what was displaced, not whether a logo is morally ugly.

Example

A hardware shop replaced by a phone retailer that already had three branches within a mile, leaving residents without a place to match a screw.

Conclusion

Brands spread because they are predictable. The sameness matters when it deletes a use the chain does not provide.

Position

Positive when the celebration is learned from people whose festival it is, and negative when it is a costume and a sale with the meaning scraped off.

Body paragraph 1

Point

Joining a festival as a guest can be how a neighbour’s calendar becomes intelligible instead of exotic.

Explanation

A household that is invited to a meal, hears why the date matters, and helps with the ordinary work is not stealing a symbol. They are being trusted with it. Cities with more than one calendar need some of that trust or the calendars stay rumours.

Example

A street iftar that local non-Muslim residents were asked to help set up, with the host explaining the fast before anyone ate.

Body paragraph 2

Point

A shop display that uses the festival’s objects as a seasonal promotion, with no one from that culture deciding the use, is an extraction.

Explanation

The development turns negative when the only version on offer is the one that sells. The date’s rules are the inconvenient part — fasting, mourning, a ban on some foods — and those are what the display drops. What remains is a costume.

Example

A department store that sold a sacred object as a table decoration in the week of the festival, without anyone who kept the festival on the buying team.

Conclusion

Guest participation is a positive development. A seasonal costume run by a retailer is not.