An official sample essay for TOEFL academic discussion task with score 5
Writing Practice Set 4: (Academic Discussion) -- Instructions, Question and Discussion
Your professor is teaching a class on economics. Write a post responding to the professor’s question.
In your response you should:
•express and support your opinion
•make a contribution to the discussion
An effective response will contain at least 100 words. You will have 10 minutes to write it.
Dr. Achebe
When people are asked about the most important discoveries or inventions made in the last two hundred years, they usually mention something very obvious, like the computer or the cell phone. But there are thousands of other discoveries or inventions that have had a huge impact on how we live today. What scientific discovery or technological invention from the last two hundred years—other than computers and cell phones—would you choose as being important? Why?
Paul
I mean, we’re so used to science and technology that we are not even aware of all the things we use in our daily lives. I would probably choose space satellites. This technology happened in the last hundred years, and it has become important for so many things. Just think about navigation, or telecommunications, or even the military.
Claire
I am thinking about medical progress. Like, for example, when scientists discovered things about healthy nutrition. I am thinking of identifying all the vitamins we need to stay healthy. I am not sure exactly when the vitamin discoveries happened, but I know they are very important. Our health is much better than it was 200 years ago.
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Writing Practice Set 4: (Academic Discussion) -- Sample Responses
Response A, Score of 5
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In the past 200 years, tons of scientific discoveries or technological inventions have been shown to the world. If I had to choose one in particular it will probably be vaccine or antibiotics. With Pasteur's work and discoveries, the world changed in a way people couldn't imagine. So many people were dying really young because at that time life's conditions were not as good as the one
we have now. With vaccine, we could now irradicate diseases that were killing millions of people, we learn so much about the immune system and ways our body was reacting to pathogens and the answers he could produce to defend us against it. Medicine evolved so much and keeps evolving every day because scientists are curious to understand how our body is working and how he is able to communicate with our environment. People aged 40 are now not that old and still have a really long life to live and enjoy when 2 centuries ago it was synonymous of 80% chance of dying.
Score explanation
This is a fully successful response. The writer chooses vaccines/antibiotics as the most important invention of the past 200 years. The author then provides a description, for contrast, of what life was like before Pasteur’s work (people dying young) and after the vaccine was created (millions of lives saved, more understanding of the immune system). The writer continues on to point out that medicine continues to evolve because of Pasteur’s work and how human lifespans have been extended. Overall, the response provides well-elaborated explanations and details to support the main opinion and provides a relevant contribution to the discussion.
While there are almost no errors in grammar and word choice, there are a few minor ones that have little impact on meaning (such as “life's conditions were not as good as the one we have” rather than “were not as good as they are now,” and “how our body is working and how he is able to communicate” rather than “how it is able to communicate”). However, these errors are fairly minor and such errors might be expected when writing under timed conditions. The writer is able to use some complex sentences and relatively precise vocabulary, which is expected in a 5-level response.