IELTS Cue Card 1– Describe a type of pollution

Describe a type of pollution that is prevalent in your city
You should say:

what type of pollution it is/ are
why it happened
effect of this pollution

Sample Answer:

India is a very crowded as well as polluted country. From my experience and by the amount of time, I have lived in India I think air and water are both polluted to an extent of point of no return and everything in surroundings is also polluted. I think air pollution is the most dangerous, and the major reason behind considering air pollution as the worst is that because every day we have to breathe in air, so if the air is polluted around us what ever is taken in, it takes in the bad particles from the air. Those elements slowly and slowly affect our body and in the long term it can have devastating and irreversible effects on our body. The short term effects might not be even visible, so people don’t care about those, but in the long run they can be very much harmful to the human body .

The major factors leading to polluted air are cutting of trees as well as increase in population. These actors are kind of inter-dependent because as the the population is growing so to make more space and to accommodate more people, government policies are designed in such a way that whatever forest areas are there in the cities, it has to be cut off to make way for accommodation of increasing population. During my childhood, I had seen that it was polluted but it was not as polluted as it is now. We used to have trees surrounding our houses. Many people did not have cars and they used to commute by two wheelers, so wider streets were not required and because of smaller vehicles even the pollution was less. However, slowly and slowly as the population kept on growing, people started moving from villages to the cities and that is where everything went opposite to what was good for our planet earth. As the population grew, so people started buying cars, also because of growing prosperity and then to wake make space for the growing traffic, the trees were cut off from the roads’ surroundings and this thing reduce the amount of greener areas near the houses.

As slowly and slowly, population kept growing, the government had to make space for the people so they started developing new housing projects in the forest areas nearby and as a result of those the trees in those areas were cut off to make space for the new housing projects but there was no planning to replace those trees and as a result the green cover over the cities kept on reducing year-by-year and now we see the ill affects of that pollution. So initially people did not notice any ill effects of that increasing pollution but now after so many years the effects are coming to the forefront. First of all, the cases of asthma and breathing related issues are on the rise and they are not only increasing in the young generation but also in the older generation.

It has been observed that after realizing that the long-term effects of what the governments did or what people did to the forest areas, the governments have started taking some remedial steps but what damage has been done it cannot be done away in a single day. As more and more trees are being planted the effects might get lesser or in the coming years, but the generations which have already been affected by those bad actions of our society will have to suffer for their lives.