'A family without pets is an incomplete family'. Express your views either for or against this statement.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 335 words) — arguing AGAINST the statement

I have had a dog for eleven years and would not be without him. That is precisely why I think the statement is wrong.

Consider what the word INCOMPLETE claims. It says that a family lacking a pet is missing something necessary — not merely a pleasure, but a part of what makes a family whole. That is a large claim, and it quietly insults a great many households. A family of three in a one-room flat in a city where the landlord forbids animals is not incomplete. A family caring for a child with asthma, or for an elderly parent who is frightened of dogs, is not incomplete. They have made a judgement about their own circumstances, and it is usually a responsible one.

There is a practical objection too. A pet is a fifteen-year commitment to a living creature that cannot speak for itself. The animals abandoned on Indian streets every year are overwhelmingly the animals of families who acquired them because it seemed like the thing to do and discovered later what it cost in time and money. Telling people their family is incomplete without one is an argument that produces exactly that outcome. A family that thinks carefully and decides no is doing better by animals than one that thinks nothing and decides yes.

The honest case on the other side is real, and I feel its force. A pet teaches a child responsibility and gentleness in a way no lesson can, and there is a particular kind of company an animal gives that nothing else replaces. I would recommend it to almost anyone.

But recommending is not the same as requiring. What completes a family is the care its members take of one another, and a household can be full of that and empty of animals. My dog has given me a great deal. He did not make my family whole. It was whole before he arrived.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

The instruction is "either for OR against", so take one side and hold it. State it in the opening paragraph.

THE KEY MOVE here is to attack the exact WORD in the quotation. The statement does not say pets are nice; it says a family without one is INCOMPLETE. Arguing against that word is far easier and sharper than arguing that pets are bad — which nobody believes. Notice that the model opens by conceding that it likes dogs, which removes the reader’s suspicion before the argument begins.

This is worth learning as a general technique for quotation questions: find the strongest word in the statement and test whether it can be defended.

EVIDENCE lifts an argument out of opinion — here, abandoned street animals and the length of the commitment. And the counter-argument paragraph is compulsory in practice. 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.