Onterra TutorAre city farms a serious food source or a pleasant hobby?
TOEFL iBT writing question in the official format, with a full model answer and notes on why it scores. Write your own version below it and get an instant rater-style score.
The question
Your professor is teaching a class on urban agriculture. Write a post responding to the professor's question. In your response, express and support your opinion and add to the discussion in your own words. A strong response has at least 100 words.
Professor Yamada: Several cities have turned vacant land into community farms and gardens. Is this a serious contribution to a city's food supply, or mainly a pleasant hobby?
Elena: It is serious. City farms cut the distance food travels, give neighbours fresh vegetables at low cost, and turn abandoned plots into places where people actually meet.
Samuel: The scale is too small to matter. A city of ten million cannot be fed from rooftops and empty lots, and that land could hold the housing these cities desperately need.
Model answer
Samuel wins on arithmetic and loses on purpose. He is correct that no rooftop will feed ten million people, but nobody serious claims it will, and judging city farms by tonnage is like judging a public park by its timber. What they produce is the thing cities are worst at: a reason for neighbours who share a postcode to share anything else. Elena is closer to the point, and I would sharpen it: the plot near my aunt's flat in Lagos supplies perhaps a week of vegetables a year, and it is also the only place where three generations of that street speak to each other. Samuel's housing point is the real objection, so the honest rule is simple: farm the land that is waiting, not the land that could hold homes.
Why this answer scores
- Concedes the numbers immediately, which frees the rest of the response to argue on stronger ground.
- The park and timber comparison shows the kind of analogy that lifts a response above a list of reasons.
- Answers the housing objection with a workable rule instead of ignoring it.
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