Writing Task 2Reported September 2026

Newspapers have a huge influence on young people's lives — positive or negative?

The question

Newspapers have a huge influence on young people lives. Is it a positive or negative effect on society?

What the report preserved: The candidate first described this only as “the topic I got regarding to newspapers influence on our society”, then gave the wording above verbatim when another reader asked them to elaborate. They never said which day they sat the test, so this page dates the sighting to the month only.

How to answer it

Read the question twice before you plan, because it moves the goalposts halfway through: the statement is about YOUNG PEOPLE, but the question asks about SOCIETY. An essay that only discusses teenagers has not answered it, and task response is where that is punished. The bridge is the whole essay — what happens to a society when its young are shaped by what they read. Take one side clearly. “It depends” is available but expensive: you have to define the conditions and then hold that line for two body paragraphs, and most candidates who start there end up sitting on the fence and losing exactly the marks they were trying to protect. Note too that “newspapers” in 2026 is worth a sentence of its own — for most young people the newspaper is an app, a push notification, a headline screenshotted onto a feed. Saying so early shows you are thinking about the real world rather than reciting a memorised media essay, and it gives you material nobody else in the room will have.

What moves the band

Answer the SOCIETY half explicitly, in its own sentence, or you have answered half the question: what this does to young readers is really a question about what kind of electorate a country ends up with.
The prompt has a grammar slip in it (“young people lives”). Do not copy it. Paraphrase to “young people's lives” and move on — correcting it silently is what a strong candidate does.
One concrete mechanism beats three abstractions. Agenda-setting, sensationalism, the way a front page decides what a country argues about that week.

These are candidate recalls. These are questions reported by test-takers after their exams, not official or leaked IELTS material. Wording varies by test version, location and memory. Use them for timed practice — never as a prediction of what you will be asked.

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Know the number. Now move it.

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