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: What are the main advantages of living in a large city?
A: Density, mostly — everything from jobs to healthcare to niche interests exists in enough concentration that you actually have options, rather than one hospital, one employer, one version of a hobby community. That density also creates a kind of anonymity that some people find liberating; you can reinvent yourself more easily when nobody's known you since childhood. The trade-off, obviously, is that all those advantages come bundled with cost and noise, so it's really a question of whether the options are worth the friction.
Q: Why do so many young people move away from rural areas?
A: Partly economic — cities concentrate the jobs that reward the specific skills young people have just spent years acquiring, so staying rural can mean being overqualified for what's locally available. But I don't think it's purely economic; there's also a stage-of-life pull toward places where you can meet a wide range of people your own age, which small towns simply can't offer at the same scale. I'd guess if rural areas offered comparable career density, a fair number of people would actually prefer to stay, given how much they complain about city life once they're in it.
Q: How could cities be made more pleasant to live in?
A: I think the biggest lever is reducing how much of daily life depends on a car, because so much of what makes a city feel hostile — noise, pollution, the sheer amount of space given to roads — traces back to that one design choice. Beyond transport, cities that keep small, informal gathering spots alive — a corner café, a local park — tend to feel more liveable than ones optimised purely for efficiency, because those spots are where the actual sense of community happens. It's less about grand redesigns and more about not accidentally engineering out the small things that make a place feel like somewhere rather than just anywhere.
Q: Do you think city life makes people more individualistic?
A: To some extent, yes, though I'd say it's less that cities create individualism and more that they remove the social pressure that keeps it in check elsewhere. In a small town everyone knows what you do and there's a kind of built-in accountability to that; in a city you can go weeks without anyone noticing your choices, which is freeing in one sense but also removes a mechanism that used to nudge people toward the collective. So I wouldn't say cities make people selfish exactly — more that they make it easier to be exactly as individualistic as you already were inclined to be.
Q: Is it possible for a city to grow without losing its character?
A: I think it's possible but genuinely difficult, because the same growth that brings investment and renewal tends to price out the people and small businesses that gave the place its character in the first place. Cities that manage it seem to do so deliberately — protecting certain neighbourhoods, keeping rents low enough for independent shops to survive alongside the new development — rather than assuming character will simply take care of itself. Left purely to market forces, growth tends to homogenise a place fairly quickly, so preserving character usually requires someone actively working against that default.