Candidates hunting for “this month’s Task 2 questions” are optimising the wrong thing. Exact questions are not reliably predictable — but the topic families and question formats are remarkably stable, and preparing at that level is both feasible and legitimate.
The recurring topic families
Task 2 questions rotate through a familiar set of themes. Any list drawn from years of past papers converges on roughly these:
- Education — university vs vocational training, what schools should teach, exams vs coursework, who should pay for education
- Technology — its effect on communication, work, children; AI and automation; privacy
- Environment — climate responsibility (individual vs government vs business), consumption, urbanisation
- Work and careers — job satisfaction vs salary, remote work, career changes, retirement
- Health — prevention vs treatment, public health spending, diet and lifestyle, healthcare funding
- Society and government — public money priorities, crime and punishment, censorship, taxation
- Globalisation and culture — cultural homogenisation, tourism, language loss, migration
- Family and demographics — ageing populations, family size, children and parenting, generational differences
- Media and advertising — influence on children, consumerism, news quality
- Cities and transport — congestion, public transport vs cars, housing
Ten families. That is the entire practical universe of Task 2, and it is small enough to prepare deliberately.
The four question formats
Every topic family arrives wrapped in one of a handful of formats, and the format dictates your essay structure more than the topic does:
- Opinion (agree/disagree) — “To what extent do you agree?” You need a clear position sustained through the whole essay.
- Discussion — “Discuss both views and give your own opinion.” Both views genuinely discussed, and your position stated — omitting your own view is a classic Task Response penalty.
- Advantages/disadvantages — sometimes with “do the benefits outweigh the drawbacks?”, which quietly turns it into an opinion essay.
- Problem/solution — “What problems does this cause and what solutions are there?” Two clear jobs; answer both.
(A fifth, the two-part “direct questions” format, is really two short jobs in one prompt — answer each explicitly.)
The highest-value preparation exercise is practising the same topic across different formats. “Remote work: agree or disagree” and “remote work: problems and solutions” share vocabulary but demand different essays. Candidates who only practise one format write that format regardless of what the question asks — and Task Response, the criterion most affected, caps the band immediately.
Prepare ideas, never essays
Memorised essays fail for two reasons: examiners are trained to spot them, and they rarely fit the actual question’s angle. What is worth preparing:
Two or three concrete idea pairs per topic family. For education: one argument for practical skills (employment outcomes), one for academic breadth (adaptability), one example you can deploy from your own country’s system. Idea generation under time pressure is the real Task 2 bottleneck for most candidates — 40 minutes is not long enough to both invent and write.
Topic vocabulary in collocations, not word lists. “Curriculum reform”, “vocational pathways”, “graduate employability” — chunks you can actually place in a sentence. Ten strong collocations per family beats a hundred isolated words.
Flexible opinions. Decide roughly what you think about the big recurring debates before exam day. You are graded on how you argue, not what you conclude — but candidates with no opinion spend their first ten minutes acquiring one.
Turning this into a weekly routine
A preparation loop that covers the ground in about ten weeks: one topic family per week. Early in the week, build the idea pairs and collocations. Then write one timed essay in one format. Get feedback, focusing on which of the four criteria scored lowest. Later in the week, write the same topic in a different format and see whether the criterion moved.
The feedback step is the one you cannot skip. Ideas and vocabulary are visible to you; whether your position stayed consistent or your paragraphs actually cohere is exactly what you cannot see in your own writing. An essay checker that scores each criterion separately — or timed writing practice with criteria-level feedback — closes that loop after every essay instead of leaving you to guess.