雅思真题常考6大作文题目观点素材库I. Are cars doing more harm than good?Arguments：1. Cars are evils resulting from modernization, for they make people suffer rather than enjoy life.2. Traffic accidents caused by cars not only bring death and injury, but also make people suffer mentally and psychologically.3. Every year car owners have to pay vast sums to the exchequer: road tax, purchase tax, oil tax, etc. This is a big drain on their resources.4. Since China has such a large population, the popularisation of private cars will only bring about serious social problems.5. Cars should be done away with. We should try to find a safer means of transport which will bring joy and comfort rather than injury and death.6. The roads are so often jammed with cars that ambulances and fire engines find it difficult to fulfil their duties.7. People's hidden frustrations and disappointments are brought to the surface when they drive.8. Road networks for cars have not only made cities uninhabitable, but also desecrated the countryside.9. Cars often produce air pollution and fill the cities with unbearable noise.10. Cars are the cause of traffic accidents. All over the world thousands upon thousands of people are killed or injured every year.Counter-arguments：1. Motor cars are highly desirable for obvious reasons. We should recognize this and adapt ourselves.2. Motor cars enable people to become more mobile. Without cars, the world would still consist of isolated communities.3. If there are more cars in China's rural areas, people can get to cities more easily. The gap between town and country will become smaller.4. Possessing a car gives one a much greater degree of mobility, enabling him to move around freely.5. The owner of a car is not forced to rely on public transport and is, therefore, not compelled to work locally.6. Long distances can be covered rapidly and pleasantly.7. Buses are often crowded and slow, especially during rush-hour. If there are more cars, people can get around more easily.8. With the popularisation of cars, the suburbs will become more developed, and the downtown area will be less crowded.9. Cars and motorists are not to blame for road accidents. Problems like too many road signs, faulty traffic lights, sudden narrowing of a street and congested parking are the real cause of traffic accidents.10. There must be universal adoption of multi-storey and underground car parks so that car-parks won’t become a problem.II. Are pets good for mankind?Arguments:1. Pets are of particular importance to children in this Plastic Age when most of us live in large cities.2. Watching the everyday activities of a pet helps a child to understand nature and cope with problems.3. Learning to care for a pet helps a child to grow up into a loving adult who feels responsible towards those dependent on him.4. The great virtue of pets is that they can keep us company.5. A pet is kept as a companion that makes us feel happy. It's suggested, that pets should be sent to astronauts in a spacecraft to help reduce the loneliness of space flights.6. Besides providing mere companionship, pets invite us to love and be loved.7. Often a cat or a dog can comfort us at times when human words don't help.8. Animals can communicate with each other in their particular way. They communicate with human beings, too, for they are quick to sense anger and sorrow.9. People keep pets for emotional rather than economic reasons.10. A pet dog brings its master (owner) a sense of confidence, for he can see in the dog that faithfulness does exist and he does have something to trust.Counter-arguments:1. Keeping pets is just a waste of time and resources.2. The growing number of pets has caused serious hygiene problems that cannot be solved.3. The earth will no longer be a world of human beings and animals but a world of animals only if we don't take measures to stop the increase of pets.4. Pet dogs and cats of both ***es should be sterilized because the animals themselves are in danger of becoming the first victims for the simple reason that their owners don't have enough time for too many of them.5. Pets are humanized by those who keep pets. Owing to their need for a home, for food and drink, pets are tamed and idealized by their owners.6. People nowadays are so crazy about pets that they even neglect caring for their own children.7. A campaign should be launched against the overpopulation of pets.8. As a matter of fact those who keep pets don't always treat their pets with kindness. They sometimes abandon their pets when they go away on holiday and are unable to take the pets along with them.9. It's really against nature to cage birds, chain dogs and keep cats within the house.10. Pets are animals. They should be seen in their natural habitat rather than in the homes of human beings.III. Do Advertisements Play a Positive or Negative role in our Society? Arguments:1. Advertisements provide the most direct comprehensive and detailed information. We get to know about household goods from advertisements.2. Advertising itself is a business that has provided a great number of jobs.3. With advertisements, people save a lot of time in shopping, looking for jobs, etc.4. Daily life needs advertisements because the main function of advertising is to disseminate information on commodities, services, culture, employment, student enrolment and even marriage.5. A cheerful, witty advertisement makes such a difference to a drab wall or a newspaper full of news of calamities.6. Without advertisements, newspapers, commercial radios and television companies could not survive.7. You can find a job. rent an apartment, buy or sell a house, etc. by way of advertising.8. Advertising is a process of artistic creation.9. Advertising creates mass markets. Without advertisements, manufacturers may find it difficult to sell their products.10. Advertising helps stabilize industry and employment, improves quality, and, by competition, helpskeep prices within bounds.Counter-arguments:1. Advertisements are imposed upon a captive audience: e.g. on television.2. Advertisements on TV are a nuisance: they interrupt television programmes at a shocking frequency.3. Consumers have to pay more for the goods owing to the advertising expenses: high prices are maintained by such artificial means.4. Advertisements are simply misleading and cheating. They are filled with flowery phrases and empty promises.5. Fake advertising cheats consumers and, in some serious cases, threatens gullible people's lives.6. Advertisers are inconsiderate to the public. What they care about is making money.7. Advertisements are not -based on the quality of the goods, but on the principle that if one keeps talking about the same thing long enough, eventually people will pay attention to it.8. Advertisements are an insidious form of brainwashing, using the same techniques, like slogans, catchphrases, etc.9. Advertising is offensive: it appeals to baser instincts.10. Advertising cheapens the quality of life: most ads are in poor taste.IV. Does fashion contribute anything to society?Arguments:1. A good appearance may help people make a better impression in social contacts.2. When people are getting old, they should pay more attention to their appearance.3. The way people are dressed helps them to preserve a sense of their own value and personality.4. Fashion adds spice to life with its rich colour, variety, and beauty.5. Men and women follow fashions in order to please each other and themselves.6. The world will be a dull place to live in if people always wear clothes of the same style and colour.7. Mass production makes well-designed clothes cheap, available to everyone.8. The fashion industry is an enormous one. It provides employment for people like textile workers, designers, shopkeepers, etc.9. The fashion industry has helped industrial research in the sense that a lot of new materials, like nylon, rayon, etc. have been made to meet the demand of the consumers.10. Being well-dressed is of psychological importance because confidence in one's appearance leads to confidence in one's success in life.Counter-arguments:1. People sometimes look odd with the so-called fashionable hair styles, make-up, and dresses.2. Top designers in Paris and London are dictatorial, for they lay down the law and the whole world rushes to obey.3. Fashion goes like this: one year, one thing; the next year, the reverse.4. People are so vain that they are afraid of being seen in old-fashioned clothes.5. People, especially the fashion-followers, are blackmailed by fashion-designers and stores.6. Changing fashions is a deliberate creation of waste because one will have to discard a lot of new clothes in order to follow fashions.7. Fashion designers are not interested in important things like warmth, comfort, and durability of the clothes. They are only interested in outward appearance and profits.8. The odder the clothes, the more expensive they are, and the more fashionable they become. It's agreat pity that people have lost their appreciation of real beauty.9. In order to follow fashions, people have to put up with great discomfort, such as suffering from cold in winter.10. One's confidence does not grow from the way one is dressed, but from the inner qualities one possesses.V. Does parental permissiveness affect children's development?Arguments:1. The excessive permissiveness of present-day parents is doing more harm than good to children and society as well.2. Children should develop the habit of working and living independently and, meanwhile, practise the virtue of being filial to their parents.3. Children who have a surfeit of happiness in their child hood often emerge like stodgy puddings and fail to make a success of life.4. The fact that young people nowadays are self-centred, indifferent and inconsiderate 'of others is largely the outcome of parental permissiveness in their childhood.5. Parental authority in a family helps a child to develop his character healthily.6. Parents should exercise strict discipline over their children because, the more permissive the parents are, the more rebellious against their parents the children will become.7. Lavish care and excessive permissiveness will only give rise to hedonism among the younger generation.8. If one lets the child do whatever he wants to, he will ruin the child for life.9. We have to admit the fact that we now have got a generation of spoilt, self-centred brats with no respect for their elders.10. The spread of juvenile delinquency in our age is largely due to parental permissiveness.Counter-arguments:1. More care for children is not the same as permissiveness to them.2. The truth is that parents nowadays do not take enough care of their children and often neglect their development because the parents are only interested in their careers.3. Parents are not at all permissive to their children. Violence often takes place in families in which children are abused.4. Only a relaxed family atmosphere can help the physical and psychological growth of children.5. To let children do what they like contributes to their independence and competence in their adult lives.6. It is unfair to blame parents for the spread of juvenile delinquency. There are a lot of other causes involved.7. Many cases show that children leave home and become members of street gangs just because they can not bear authoritarian control over them by their parents.8. Strict discipline does not always work in terms of developing children's personal qualities. Too much pressure on children leads to rebellion and other extreme actions.9. Parents are not justified in using violence to keep discipline and maintain their authority over the children.10. Children are human beings, too. They need to be protected instead of being frequently scolded or physically abused.VI. Does television play a positive or negative role in the modern world? Arguments:1. Television is now playing a very important part in our lives.2. Television is not only a convenient source of entertainment, but also a comparatively cheap one.3. Television keeps one informed about current events, allows one to follow the latest developments in science and politics and offers an endless series of programmes which are both instructive and entertaining.4. A lot of television programmes introduce people to things they have never thought or heard of before.5. Television has been good company to those who do not work, like housewives, lonely old people, etc.6. Television provides enormous possibilities for education, like school programmes via closed-circuit television.7. Television provides special broadcasts for those in TV university, or open university. It also offers specialised subjects like language teaching, sewing, cooking, painting, cosmetics, etc.8. Television does the job of education in the broadest sense. Instructive programmes achieve their goal through entertaining the viewers.9. Compared with the radio, everything on television is more lifelike, vivid, and real.10. Television may be a vital factor in holding a family together where there are, for example, economic problems and husband and wife seem at breaking point.POPULATIONS OUTRUNNING WATER SUPPLYLester R. Brown and Brian HalweilAs world population approaches 6 billion on October 12, 1999, water tables are falling on every continent, major rivers are drained dry before they reach the sea and millions of people lack enough water to satisfy basic needs.Water tables are now falling in China, India, and the United States, which together produce half the world's food. Historically, irrigated farming has been plagued with water logging, salting, and silting, but now, with the advent of powerful diesel and electrically powered pumps, it is also threatened by aquifer depletion.In China, water tables are falling almost everywhere that the land is flat. Under the North China Plain, the country's breadbasket, water tables are falling by 1.5 meters, or roughly 5 feet, per year. Where wells have gone dry, farmers have been forced either to drill deeper, if they can afford it, or to abandon irrigated agriculture, converting back to lower-yield rainfed farming.In India, a country whose population hit 1 billion on August 15, the pumping of underground water is now estimated to be double the rate of aquifer recharge from rainfall. The International Water Management Institute, the world's premier water research group, estimates that India's grain harvest could be reduced by up to one fourth as a result of aquifer depletion. In a country adding 18 million people per year, this is not good news.In the southern Great Plains of the United States, depletion of the Ogallala aquifer has already led to irrigation cutbacks. Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado have been losing irrigated land over the last two decades. Texas, for example, has lost irrigated land at roughly one percent per year since 1980.Rivers running dry provide an even more visible manifestation of water shortages as growing populations take more water. The Yellow River, the cradle of Chinese civilization, first ran dry in 1972. Since 1985, it has run dry for part of each year. In 1997, it failed to reach the sea during 226 days, or roughly 7 months of the year.During the dry season, the Ganges River has little water left when it reaches the Bay of Bengal. India, with more than a billion people taking the lion's share of the water, is leaving too little for the farmers of Bangladesh during the dry season.In central Asia, the Amu Darya, one of two rivers that once fed the Aral Sea, is now drained dry by farmers in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As the Sea has shrunk to scarcely half its original size, the rising salt concentration has destroyed all fish, eliminating a rich fishery that once landed 100 million pounds of fish per year.Similarly, the Colorado, the major river in the southwestern United States, rarely ever makes it to the Gulf of California. The fishery at its mouth that once supported several thousand Cocopa Indians has now disappeared. Today the Nile, like many other major rivers, has little water left when it reaches the sea. Even though virtually all the water in the river is now claimed, the population of the three principal basin countries-Egypt, the Sudan, and Ethiopia, where most of the water originates-is projected to increase from 153 million today to 343 million in 2050, generating intense competition for water.Hydrologists estimate that when the amount of fresh water per person in a country drops below 1,700 cubic meters per year the country is facing water stress. In her new book, Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last, World watch senior fellow Sandra Postel reports that the number of people living in countries experiencing water stress will increase from 467 million in 1995 to over 3 billion by 2025 as population continues to grow. In effect, these people will not have enough water to produce food and satisfy residential and other needs.Postel estimates the current world water deficit "the excess of water pumping over recharge from rainfall" at 160 billion tons per year. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain, this water deficit is equal to 160 million tons of grain, a quantity only slightly less than annual world grain exports of 200 million tons.Ironically, the excessive grain supplies that have depressed world grain prices in 1999 are partly the result of over pumping. If falling water tables were stabilized by a cutback in pumping, the resulting decline in grain production would likely drive prices off the top of the chart.As water becomes scarce, the competition for water between cities and countryside intensifies. In this competition, farmers almost always lose. In North Africa and the Middle East, the region ranging from Morocco in the west to Iran in the east, virtually every country is experiencing water shortages. As citiesgrow, countries take water from agriculture to satisfy expanding urban water needs. The countries then import grain to offset the water losses.Given that importing one ton of grain is equal to importing 1,000 tons of water, this is the most efficient way for water-short countries to import water. Last year the water required to produce the grain and other farm products imported into this region was roughly equal to the annual flow of the Nile River. With more and more countries looking to the world market for food, spreading water scarcity may soon translate into world food scarcity.It is often said that the competition for water among countries may take the form of military conflict. But it now seems more likely that the competition for water will take place in world grain markets. It is the countries that are financially strongest, not those that are militarily the strongest, that are likely to win in this competition.If the world could move from the U.N. medium population projection of nearly 9 billion in 2050 to the low projection of less than 7 billion, water stresses would be greatly alleviated, making the water problem much more manageable. If the world stays on the current population trajectory, a growing share of humanity may simply lack the water needed for a decent life.。