"Money is important for happiness." Express your views either for or against this statement.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 375 words) — arguing FOR the statement

We are taught from childhood that money cannot buy happiness, and the people who taught me this had enough of it. I want to argue that money is important for happiness — not sufficient for it, which is a different claim, but genuinely important.

Begin with what poverty actually is. It is not a simple absence of luxuries. It is a mother deciding which of two children sees a doctor. It is a family whose house floods every monsoon because they cannot afford to move. It is a boy leaving school at fourteen because his wages are needed. To tell such a family that money is unimportant for happiness is not wisdom; it is an insult delivered from a comfortable distance.

The research is unusually clear on this point. Study after study finds that reported wellbeing rises steeply with income at low levels and then flattens — the first few thousand rupees a month transform a life, the ten-thousandth changes very little. What that curve tells us is precisely that money matters enormously up to a point. The proverb is not false; it is simply written by people already past the point.

There is a second argument, less often made. Money buys OPTIONS, and options are most of what we mean by freedom. A person with savings can leave a job that humiliates him, take a year to study, help a friend, refuse work he thinks wrong. A person without them takes what is offered. It is difficult to be happy while having no choices, and almost all choices cost something.

The honest objection is that the pursuit of money can itself destroy happiness — that people work eighty-hour weeks and lose their families and health in exchange for figures on a screen. That is true and it is common, and it is an argument against greed, not against money.

So the statement stands, with one correction. Money is important for happiness in the way that air is important for running. Nobody runs in order to breathe, and nobody is happy merely because he is rich. But take it away and see how far anyone gets.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

The instruction is "either for OR against", so take one side and hold it.

THE KEY MOVE with this particular statement is to distinguish IMPORTANT from SUFFICIENT. The proverb everyone quotes — "money cannot buy happiness" — attacks sufficiency, and the statement here only claims importance. Making that distinction in the opening paragraph gives you an argument nobody can dismiss with a proverb.

EVIDENCE lifts this type out of opinion. The observation about wellbeing rising steeply and then flattening is a real finding and can be stated without a citation.

Be careful with the CONCRETE EXAMPLES of poverty. They are the strongest part of the case and must be specific rather than sentimental — a mother choosing which child sees a doctor does more work than a paragraph about suffering.

The closing analogy is worth studying as a technique: it concedes the opponent’s point and keeps its own in a single image. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see "Composition — grade bands and marking" in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter, along with the worked model for this composition type.

USE THIS AS A MODEL, NOT AS AN ANSWER TO MEMORISE. The question asks for an ORIGINAL composition, and every year examiners identify scripts reproduced from guide books; a memorised answer can be penalised for plagiarism and will in any case read as borrowed. Study this piece for its STRUCTURE — how it opens, how the paragraphs are ordered, where the required tasks are answered, how it ends — and then write your own, about your own school, your own family, your own town. Your own specific detail is worth more marks than anyone else’s polished sentence.