TOEFL independent writing task tests the candidate’s writing ability through a 30 minutes essay task. This TOEFL writing sample for TOEFL independent writing talks about how movies or TV affects the life of people. Candidates are required to provide pieces of evidence, personal opinions, and experiences to form the essay. There is a wide variety of TOEFL independent writing topics that candidates can find in TOEFL writing practice papers.

Topic: How Do Movies or TV Affect People?

Model Answer 1:

Television allows us to spare time in different ways. It is a medium that reaches the audience among which the majority follow the basic news, programs, and movies due to TV all over the world. Watching TV or movies affect people in both positive and negative ways. Unnecessary watching TV or movies damage humans and make them less active. In my essay, I will describe how TV influences people positively and negatively.

First of all, I mentioned the negative effects. Addiction to too many films and daily soaps make us unhealthy, both mentally and physically. We stop our activity and become mentally lazy. Watching sports on TV may help us to gather information but it prevents us from playing outside. TV provokes people to live a fantasy life more than reality. Violent movies and news make people more violent and they become less sensitive. Another bad thing about TV is advertisements. Children are often impressed by ads and force their parents to buy things. Moreover, daily soap has great damage on house-wife and youth and children’s behavior. They are able to distinguish between right and wrong. Additionally, people spend most of their time in front of the TV, staying far away from real communication. Also, people will suffer from eye pain for long periods of sitting before TV.

TV also influences people positively. Movies help to reduce stress. Some programs produced on TV make people feel relaxed. Some sports events and programs spread amusement among them and help them to forget all problems and difficulties. Moreover, television provides great knowledge and information about different countries and their population, cultures, histories, etc. Through programs on TV, people can learn practical skills for communicating with each other. Through practical and real-life programs people learn about lessons from those cases and know how to behave in certain cases. TV brings about a huge source of entertainment like action films, horror films to romantic films, etc. Nowadays TV has clearly become an essential part of modern life. The reality shows shown on different channels on TV provide huge opportunities to show talents. Besides that, it provides different types of occupation options. There are so many people in our society who live depending upon TVs.

Everyone knows that movies and television can influence people negatively and also make them feel relaxed. The positivity of TV depends on how much you watch, what you watch, and how you utilize your time.

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Model Answer 2:

There are many advantages and disadvantages of TV in our society. My personal belief is that the proper utility of television influences relationships among friends and families positively and improves communication. So, I completely disagree with this statement.

Before the invention of TV, people spent their time gambling, reading, gossiping, or playing chess. So, now people can at least utilize their time by gaining knowledge from TV. Sometimes television destroyed communication among family members and friends due to too much addiction. If members of a family do not have common interests and they do not have anything to share with each other, they start to avoid each other and find television a great way of entertainment. If they want to live like a happy family, they need to make each other happy and find many ways to spend their time together. Sometimes people blame TV for this communication gap.

Television gathered families together providing family and comedy shows. By watching these programs they spend a lot of time together. For example, by watching cartoons parents and their children can share their opinions with each other and educate their children about what is right or wrong about this content. So, television helps family members to communicate positively.

TV programs are one of the most favorite topics of discussion in gossip in schools, colleges, and everywhere. The most common topic of conversation among the younger generation is about TV shows or actors. Senior people gossip about sports and politics and cooking shows. The news channels make us aware of our society. My friends and I both like western TV series, and share our ideas and content every week. So, it is very clear that television can encourage friends to talk with each other.

Besides all these things TV is a good entertainment medium and you can entertain your guests with that. If you don’t know someone and want to communicate with him/her, you just need to find a common topic from some popular TV shows or programs. Some housewives could not live without watching daily soaps, so the easiest way to communicate with them is to talk about favorite TV serials.

Though it has some side effects, television always improves communications among friends and families. There are so many ways to communicate in various ways with friends and family. But watching too much TV makes you mentally lazy and always discourages you from communicating. How you improve yourself completely depends on how you utilize TV.