Model answer
Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
Q: Why do people keep moving to big cities?
A: The honest answer is opportunity density — a big city compresses years' worth of chances to change jobs, meet people, or pivot careers into a space you can physically access, which a smaller place just can't replicate no matter how pleasant it is. There's also a self-reinforcing element: as more opportunity concentrates in cities, more of the infrastructure and culture that makes ambitious life easier follows it, which then attracts even more people. So it's not just that cities offer more — it's that the gap tends to widen over time rather than close.
Q: What makes a city liveable?
A: I'd put it down to how much friction is built into ordinary tasks — getting to work, buying groceries, seeing a doctor. A city can have spectacular architecture and still feel unliveable if every small errand takes forty minutes and involves three different systems. Beyond logistics, I think liveability also depends on whether a place has room for spontaneity — bumping into someone, discovering a street you hadn't walked down — because a city that's entirely optimised for efficient movement from A to B tends to feel efficient but slightly soulless.
Q: Should governments limit city growth?
A: I'm sceptical of hard limits, because they usually just push the same pressure somewhere less regulated rather than solving it — people still need to live and work somewhere. I think it's more productive to manage growth than cap it: investing well ahead of demand in transport and housing so growth doesn't outpace the infrastructure meant to absorb it. The failure mode isn't cities getting bigger, it's cities getting bigger faster than anyone planned for.
Q: Do smaller cities offer a better quality of life than large ones?
A: On some measures, definitely — shorter commutes, lower cost of living, less noise — but I don't think it's a clean win, because those advantages often come with a narrower range of options in career, culture and social life. I think it depends heavily on what stage of life someone's in; a smaller city can feel ideal once you've settled into a career and want space, but limiting if you're still trying to work out what you want to do. So quality of life isn't fixed by city size alone, it's more about the fit between city size and what someone actually needs at that point.
Q: How might cities change over the next few decades?
A: I'd guess the biggest shift is cities designed increasingly around people rather than vehicles, simply because the costs of car-centric design — space, pollution, cost — are becoming harder to justify as cities get denser. I also suspect remote work will pull some of the pure economic necessity out of city living, so the cities that thrive will be the ones people actively want to be in, not just the ones with the jobs. That's a more precarious position for a city to be in than simply being unavoidable, which might actually push a lot of them to become more pleasant places, out of self-interest as much as anything.