Express your views either for or against the statement 'Junk food should be banned'.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 340 words) — arguing AGAINST the statement

Junk food is bad for us. I take that as settled, and nothing that follows disputes it. What I dispute is the word BANNED.

Consider first what a ban would actually mean. Somebody would have to decide where the line falls. Is a samosa junk food? A jalebi? The sweets distributed at every festival in this country are fried in sugar syrup and nobody proposes to outlaw them. Any workable definition would either be so narrow that it caught only foreign fast food — which is politics, not health — or so wide that it criminalised half the cuisine of India.

Second, prohibition has a consistent record, and it is not a good one. When alcohol was banned in the United States, consumption did not stop; it moved underground and enriched criminals. Where states in India have tried prohibition, the same pattern has repeated. A ban on a thing people genuinely want does not remove the want; it removes the regulation.

Third, and most importantly, a ban teaches nothing. A student forbidden to buy chips at the school canteen buys them at the shop outside, and has learnt only that adults are an obstacle. A student who has been taught what a trans fat does to an artery, and who has read the label on the packet himself, has acquired something that will still be working on him at forty.

What should be done instead is not nothing. Advertising junk food to children can be restricted, as tobacco advertising was. Clear front-of-pack labelling can be made compulsory. School canteens can be required to sell real food at a price that undercuts the alternative. Taxes can make the unhealthy option the expensive one. Every measure in that list is more effective than a ban, and none of them requires deciding whether a samosa is a crime.

Ban the advertising. Tax the sugar. Teach the labels. But leave the choice with the person eating, because in the end that is the only place it can ever really sit.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

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

A STRATEGIC POINT worth learning from this model: the ANTI-ban case is easier to argue well, because the pro-ban case tends to collapse into "junk food is unhealthy" — which nobody disputes and which therefore generates no argument. Notice that the model CONCEDES the health point in its first line and then argues about something else entirely. Conceding what cannot be denied is a strength, not a weakness.

EVIDENCE separates the top band. Prohibition in America, tobacco advertising rules, front-of-pack labelling — each is a real example that could be checked.

The closing paragraph OFFERS ALTERNATIVES rather than simply refusing. An argumentative essay that says only "no" is weaker than one that says "not this — but this instead". 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.