IELTS Writing Task 2 – Some people think museums should be enjoyable places to attract and entertain
Some people think museums should be enjoyable places to attract and entertain
young people, while others think the purpose of museums should be to educate, not entertain.
Discuss both sides and give your own opinion.
You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.
You should write at least 250 words.
IELTS Writing Task 2/ IELTS Essay Sample
Sample Answer 1:
Museums are places where important objects of cultural, historical and scientific value
are preserved and shown to the public. This function makes them play an extremely
important role in disseminating human civilization. It is a topic of debate whether the
main purpose of museums is to only educate or do both educate as well as entertain.
Museums such as the British Museum, the Louver, and the National Palace Museum
are regarded as a vital educational resource because they highlight the achievements
that have been accomplished by all mankind throughout history. Visiting them is an
eye-opening experience. One will definitely be shocked by what is on display and learn
something that they did not know previously. Actually, the majority of those who visit
museums expect to know more about museum pieces of art and antiquities or those
reflecting the development of science and technology. Therefore, museums should
focus on providing more authentic information to meet their expectations.
On the other hand, it is certainly right for museums to improve their management,
service and environment to attract young people who obviously need to be
encouraged to learn more about human cultural history. If museums focus only on
education and do not make things interesting, then they will not be visited much and
even their function of education will not be fulfilled.
Today’s interactive museums are always crowded. This is because, people enjoy and
learn at the same time. In the planetarium, one feels one is actually in space. This
arouses curiosity to know more about the planets and satellites. However, museums
should not overdo the entertainment and go astray—by which I mean museums
should make it clear that they are not purely a source of entertainment, like a disco
bar, cinema or amusement park.
To sum up, museums should try their best to educate people and this can be better
done if they make learning fun especially for today’s youth.
Model Answer 2:
People have different views about the role and function of museums. In my opinion, museums can and should be both entertaining and educational.
On the one hand, it can be argued that the main role of a museum is to entertain. Museums are tourist attractions, and their aim is to exhibit a collection of interesting objects that many people will want to see. The average visitor may become bored if he or she has to read or listen to too much educational content, so museums often put more of an emphasis on enjoyment rather than learning. This type of museum is designed to be visually spectacular, and may have interactive activities or even games as part of its exhibitions.
On the other hand, some people argue that museums should focus on education. The aim of any exhibition should be to teach visitors something that they did not previously know. Usually this means that the history behind the museum’s exhibits needs to be explained, and this can be done in various ways. Some museums employ professional guides to talk to their visitors, while other museums offer headsets so that visitors can listen to detailed commentary about the exhibition. In this way, museums can play an important role in teaching people about history, culture, science and many other aspects of life.
In conclusion, it seems to me that a good museum should be able to offer an interesting, enjoyable and educational experience so that people can have fun and learn something at the same time.
Model Answer 3:
Admittedly, the dramatic decrease in the number of visitors has seriously threatened the survival of museums, especially the scientific ones, because they have become musty old tombs for objects that too often lack a human connection. Therefore, there is always a justification of adding amusement elements into the museum, for the purpose of recovering its vitality among the public. For example, instead of staidly presenting those boring theories and data, an astronomy museum can use technologies like 3D movies and video games to show the universe, planets and the earth. This is a so active, exciting and inspiring experience of an interaction between science and human that more youngsters will be attracted to visit and play in this museum. As a result, the high popularity of museums among young generations can keep them from closing down in the future.
However, I still believe the educational function of museums should be given priority over the
entertainment, because main contents in a museum, such as history, culture and arts, have a nature purpose of teaching. For example, by visiting Pearl Harbor museum, a site in World War 2, American tourists can be educated to honor soldiers who sacrificed their lives for the country, thus forming the patriotism. Similarly, a museum specializing in displaying cultural items like traditional food, clothes, antiques, paintings and handicrafts plays a role of teaching and spreading local-culture identities, which is a main means by which young generations can learn to respect, protect and inherit their own culture. Obviously, the influences of museums mentioned above are more educationally meaningful, with nothing to do with entertainment.
Another reason why a museum should be exclusive from the entertainment is a concern about the atmosphere. Generally speaking, a museum should be a quiet and peaceful room where visitors can fully focus on watching, appreciating and learning historic things and artistic works in deployment. However, as long as it turns into an enjoyable place, we can expect that it will be occupied with pop music, restaurants, groceries and even arcades, and all of these entertaining facilities would make the museum noisy, overcrowded and upsetting.
In conclusion, my opinion is that museums should lay more emphasis on the aim of educating the public. Although catering to the youth by providing entertainment can help to restore the popularity of museums, the fundamental goal of these facilities should still focus on teaching historic and cultural knowledge to visitors.
Model Answer 4:
In the contemporary world, a variety of museums are sprouting up all over the world, of course which appear in China, for the reason of the museums’ development and increase, the goal for visiting museums are different from before we went there. Some people regard that museums should be enjoyable places to entertain people such as the sea museum or others which tend to attract children, however, others believe, the purpose of museums is still to educate rather than entertain people. What’s more, in fact, basically, there are museums built for public citizens to inspire patriotism instead of a recreational place. Frankly speaking, I am more in favor of the latter viewpoint, building museums plays a key role in inspiration and education to public citizens.
Generally speaking, museums is the symbol of national gorgeous history, which represent the nation’s promising future, to some extent, visiting museums could cultivate our enthusiasm, for our country dramatically, especially during the children’s education period, we can see that teachers constantly lead the pupils to these museums to learn from the nation’s past experience. In this day and age, different types of museums are established in different fields such as aviation airplane musems, famous historians museums, art works museums, which exhibit different processional fields and knowledge to public, through visiting these museums, people especially the students could get better hang of different areas, which is beneficial for them to know the society status in order that they could find a suitable field to work hard. Finally, museums is distinguished form other office buildings and recreational places, because that not only museum is a form of architecture, but is regarded as educational resources.
Admittedly, among present museums, there are simply a couple of museums built for amusing children such as the sea museum as I referred to, although this kind of museum could be regarded as a entertaining place for children, to a large extent, parents prefer to educating their child and enabling them to know much more about the sea through visiting these museums. Therefore, as for me, even though there are some museums where people could be relax as a leisure place, but essentially, I still believe the founder just tend to provide more significant information through the way of recreation.
All in all, I f all the museums not only educate visitors as a learning resource, but could they attract people as a amusing activity, these museums could play more vital role in promoting national development.
Model Answer 5:
Talked about the position of the museum, there are two separate viewpoints. Some people treat it as a place to relief themselves while the others consist that we should emphasis the education function of the museums. With views of both sides considerate, I think it is time to break the routine and give museum an opportunity to function its recreation.
Here are my arguments. First of all, with the rapid development of the modern society, people especially the juvenile are so stressful that they need a place to release the pressure. As a result of this demands, museums which function like a entertainment place emerges one by one. And this phenomenon in return demonstrates my opinion that museums should be enjoyable places.
In the second place, in my opinion it is time to reposition the role of the museum. For a long time, museum is always classified as a serious place. However, compared to old days, culture nowadays are much more diverse, at the same time popular arts need a more inclusive stage to express their contents. In this situation, the old style museum can not fulfill its needs.
Also, there are some opponents who disagree with my opinion. They argue that the educational feature of museum should not be discarded. For example, people may benefit from the traditional drama which tells the story of courage and decision.
All in all, although the educational meaning of the museum can not be estimated, the needs of the modern human beings can not be ignored, too.
Model Answer 6:
Normally, museums are considered to have a vital function in serving their public for educational purpose, yet many museum goers also aim to seek an entertainment experience, which, I believe, is nearly impossible to ending up with a ‘purely entertaining’ experience.
There is no doubt that a primary role of museums is to educate the public. They provide tangible objects and collections that can be genuinely seen and touched by students. This provides excellent field trips for extensions of classroom as well as enhancing their curriculum. If they were changed to be entertaining-oriented to attract more visitors, then the quality of art or a history would probably be degraded or distorted, hence weakening the function of educating. Eventually, museums would be nothing less like theme parks, aiming to profits generating rather than benefiting the public.
However, there is also another voice claiming that museums should be interesting and playful, providing a relaxing place for people to have fun in their leisure time. Once they are solely built for learning without even a little of enjoyment, they would lose popularity and even financial support due to failing to attracting enough visitors.
My view is that education and entertainment don’t necessarily have to be mutually exclusive motivations for coming to the museum, but they can be integrated to achieve both aims. In fact, from our own school experience, we are more likely to be motivated to explore if content is truly entertaining, and meanwhile if we can gain something meaningful through recreation, then it’s a win-win situation.
Nevertheless, at their core, museums are educational institutions, though by a unique interesting way which differs from a traditional one in schools.
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