IELTS speaking Part 3

That is a harder question than it used to be, I think, because the distinction itself is dissolving. My instinct is that friendships which exist only online are more fragile, largely because they are easier to abandon. There is no social cost to disappearing from someone's messages, whereas walking away from someone you see at work is far more difficult. Having said that, I would not want to overstate it. People who share a genuinely uncommon interest may only ever find each other online, and those relationships can be deeper than anything geography would have produced. So I would say the medium is less important than whether there is any real obligation between the two people.

In principle I would say the responsibility has to be shared, though the balance tends to shift as a country becomes wealthier. Historically, care fell almost entirely on families, usually on women within those families, and that worked because households were larger and people did not move far from where they were born. Neither of those things is true now. If the state withdrew, the burden would fall on people who are already working full time and often raising children, which strikes me as unsustainable. That said, I would be uneasy about a system that made families feel absolved of any involvement at all, because what older people generally lack is not services but contact.

The obvious answer is that a great deal of routine work will be automated, and I think that is likely, though predictions of that sort have a poor record. What interests me more is the effect on where people work. The assumption that a job requires a building has weakened enormously in a short space of time, and if that continues, the economic consequences for city centres could be considerable. Offices would be converted, transport networks built for a morning peak would need rethinking, and smaller towns might well become more attractive than they have been for a century. Whether that would be an improvement is another question entirely.

Broadly yes, although I would qualify that fairly heavily. Some shared understanding of how a country arrived at its present arrangements seems necessary if people are going to participate in it meaningfully. The difficulty is that history teaching is rarely neutral, and there is a fine line between explaining the past and selecting the parts of it that flatter the present. So I would argue the value lies less in the facts themselves than in the habit of asking who produced an account and why. Taught that way it is genuinely useful. Taught as a list of dates and victories it is close to worthless.