IELTS Task 2 sample essay: Free Museums and Galleries
OpinionCulture and tourism
The question
Museums and art galleries should be free for everyone to visit. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
Try writing your own answer first, then compare. Reading a model before you write tends to make you copy it.
The plan
Position: Agree for permanent collections, funded publicly; special exhibitions can still charge.
- Free entry widens who visits, especially families and young people with little money.
- Museums hold shared heritage paid for by the public; charging for special exhibitions keeps budgets healthy.
Model answer
278 wordsWhether museums and galleries should charge for entry is an important question for any country that values its culture. I agree that they should be free for everyone, at least for their permanent collections, because free entry opens them to people who would otherwise never visit.
The strongest argument for free entry is that it changes who walks through the door. When even a modest fee is charged, a family of four may decide that a visit is an expense they cannot justify, and young people with little money stay away altogether. Where national museums have removed entry charges, visitor numbers have risen sharply, and many of the new visitors were people who had rarely or never been before. A museum that only the comfortable can afford fails in its basic purpose of sharing knowledge.
Moreover, the objects in public museums belong, in a real sense, to everyone. Many collections were built over centuries with public money, gifts and national resources, so asking citizens to pay again to see their own heritage is difficult to justify. Free museums also serve as places of informal education, where a child might discover an interest in history, science or art that shapes the rest of their life.
Admittedly, museums are expensive to run, and free entry places a burden on public budgets. However, this can be balanced by charging for special exhibitions, encouraging voluntary donations and earning income from cafés and shops, as many free museums already do.
In conclusion, permanent collections in museums and galleries should be free for everyone, because free entry widens access to shared heritage, while special exhibitions and other income can keep these institutions financially secure.
Scored by the MyBandPrep checker on 7 October 2026. An estimate, not an examiner’s mark. How scoring works
Why it works
- Task Response
- A clear position with a sensible limit, two developed reasons and a practical answer to the cost objection.
- Coherence and Cohesion
- A logical progression: who visits, who owns the collections, how to pay for it. Each paragraph opens with its point.
- Lexical Resource
- Natural, precise phrases: “walks through the door”, “informal education”, “financially secure”.
- Grammatical Range and Accuracy
- Varied structures, including a fronted adverbial (“Admittedly”) and accurate relative clauses.
Phrases worth reusing
- changes who walks through the door
- an expense they cannot justify
- fails in its basic purpose
- places of informal education
- financially secure
Now write your own
Answer this question in 40 minutes and get an estimated band with the sentences to fix.