Discussion after you watch
Although you might approach them differently, as I thought about the three questions, it seemed to me that the first one invites a main idea that could be supported with points that answer the next two questions.
I thought two or three paragraphs would work well, but as the author of your response, that's for you to decide.
The three questions: What do you think?
- Do you think building the new city will solve the problem of overpopulation in Cairo?
- Why / why not?
- What impact do you think moving the administrative and financial centers will have on both the new city and the city of Cairo?
- Why?
- Do you think citizens will see the new city as an attractive place to move to?
- Why / why not?
Planning and writing = 18:00 minutes
- planning = 4:00 minutes
The three steps in planning are: choose a topic (given in this case); get ideas on that topic; and organize your ideas on the topic.
It's usually a good idea to plan before you start to write. Especially in quick response writing, you might change your mind as you write, or get better ideas, but having a clear idea about what you want to say before you write the first word helps to produce a well-organized piece of work that communicates with your readers.
- writing = 12:00 minutes
If you know what you are going to say, the writing step consists of turning your ideas into sentences organized into paragraphs.
- editing = 2:00 minutes
You don't have much time to review, revise and proofread in a quick response writing activity, but it's still a good idea to quickly read over what you've written and perhaps make a few changes or corrections.
For more a more detailed explanation of the steps in the writing process, see "The Writing Process" on the blog page menu above.
A helpful strategy
It's not wrong, but you might like to avoid writing things like "question 3."
Instead, imagine you are writing for someone who has not read the question you are responding to. Your aim is to clearly communicate your response to that reader, so it might help to paraphrase the question at the start of your response to it. But it will typically be more effective to paraphrase (rewrite) ideas in questions as a statements.
Because our writing should make sense independently of the question it might be answering, this paraphrasing of questions to provide context is also a useful strategy in exams such as IELTS and TOEFL.
Reference
- Warwick, L. & Rogers, L. (2018). Skillful 4: Reading & Writing, Student's Book Pack (2nd. ed.). London: Macmillan Education
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ReplyDeleteThe capital city of Egypt, Cairo, is overpopulated, which leads to problems such as traffic jams, slums, and inadequate infrastructure. In order to solve the overpopulation of its capital city, the Egyptian government is in the process of building a new city nearby, to which a government and financial offices will be moved. Although I expect that the new city will help to relieve the population pressure to some extent, it seems unlikely to me that it will really be able to solve the problem.
ReplyDeleteFirst, it is not certain that the people now crowded into Cairo, and the 500,000 who want to crowd in over the coming year, will find the new city an attractive place to live. I'm reminded of Australia, where to solve the competition between Melbourne and Sydney to host my nation's capital when we became an independent federation of states in 1901, it was decided to put create Canberra as a new administrative city, making it the capital city of Australia. The result was a city with nothing but government offices, some great museums, plenty of parks, a decent national art gallery, and a population of government employees. And nothing else. For a long time, no one really wanted to make their home there away from family and friends elsewhere in Australia. That has changed now, but it took a couple of generations for Canberra to become an attractive place to live. I suspect the same might prove to be true of Egypt's new city. Even if it's well-designed and offers decent amenities, it won't have the social networks, traditional markets, or other aspects that make people eager to live in a place.
The transfer of administrative and financial centres to the new city will certainly have some impact on both Cairo and the new city. Some of that impact might be positive, such as better landscaping, with more parks and trees, and better transportation systems, but some of the impact might also be negative. For people living in Cairo who have business to do at a government office, having to make a special trip to the nice, new city is unlikely to be convenient, unless a comprehensive, low cost transportation system is also being built.
It seems a good idea to build new government and business centres away from an overpopulated area, but I'm not convinced that the new city will really solve the problems of overpopulation in Cairo.
Your comment helps me to be more understandable to Australia's cities.
DeleteI also would like to share my perspective to yours.
Although I never visit Australia, I suppose Canberra is quite wonderful city. I found on the internet that it was renowned for the best place to live three year in a row. To be honest, it would take a few generation to be attractive. Eventually, it is successful to attach people's interest and I hope the new administrative city nearby Cairo will follow this trend in the long run.
I would say, for Egypt, building a new city in order to deal with the problem of overpopulation in its capital city, Cairo, might be efficient and reasonable and I do support this idea. One of the reasons is when too many people living in Cairo, it is better to build another city to solve this issue by serving their accommodation, jobs, and so on in the new city.
ReplyDeleteIt is clear that moving the administrative and financial centers affect both the new and the old cities. This change will cost the huge amount of money for many companies related to these kinds of services to move to the new city. Furthermore, many people from Cairo might have to move to the new city because they must follow their company base.
However, it is challenging that their citizens are going to find the new city festinating or not. I do think that if their government provides sufficient fundamental facilities and jobs for them, they will definitely move to live in the new city and the overcrowded problem will be eliminated.
I agree with you that the citizens of Cairo have to move to the new city because the main business area should be the new city and every investor or small entrepreneur has to move following their customer. And I also agree with your idea that building the new city can solve the problem of overpopulation, but I think it might just be a short term solution.
DeleteFrom the video, I found that most family in Egypt have more than two or three kids per household. Like India, they also have the same issue. Overpopulation is rising continually in many third world countries and they haven't solved it yet. Thus, I think building a new city should solve the problem just for short term, unless we have unlimited space to build more and more city. The better solution might be contraceptive. It should better solution to prevent a pregnant to control the number of population.
In my point of view, building the new city will not solve the problem of overpopulation in Cairo. I feel that to live in the place which I do not know before is a big mistake because you will never know what is going to happen with you.
ReplyDeleteBeside moving to a house, to move the administrative and financial centers will cause a big problem. If the city has the problem, the administrative and financial centers should not have the good system too. Maybe they have to close it for a while I guess.
I think that to move into the new city will be an attractive travel place to visit but not for living place.
If they move to new city, I think the new city will crowded with investor and small business. It might cause the old city don't get a interested as the new city. In the economic aspect, the new city will a main drive the GDP of the Egypt because there are more job, more business, more opportunity. In the other hand, the depression will happen in the old city because people move to the new city.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on the aspect that the new city will help push the GDP of the country, because of new opportunities in the new city; however, I don't think that depression will happened in the old city. They might be slightly left behind, but the population in the city would decrease and help the city with its slums, traffic, and other problems caused by over crowdedness. Also, I think the old city would still be known as somewhat of a capital city with opportunities for different people.
DeleteOverpopulation in Cairo can be solved by building a new city, since in the overcrowded streets of Cairo there would certainly be people who would want to move away. Moreover, internal migrants could move to this new city instead of Cairo whose overpopulation is also caused by migrants hoping to make it in a big city. Moving the administrative and financial centers will make the new city more habitable and convenient. However, the people in Cairo would be in more of a bad situation, being left behind. Citizens would definitely find the new city more appealing than Cairo, being that there are more than 350 slums in Cairo that do not have the basic amenities that all humans should have. This would be a big motive for people to move to the new city which provides housing for 5 million citizens. However, to solve the problem of overpopulation in the long run, the government must campaign young people which make up most of Egypt’s and Cairo’s citizens not to have many children in hopes that they would make a future for them, like the generation at the present are doing.
ReplyDeleteI like your idea of government should campaign to convince young people not to have many children. I think one reason that they have a lot of children is because they might have a wrong attitude which might be relevant to their religion. Like the Chinese, they have a concept that having a lot children is a good thing, especially boy. So, if the government want to reduce the number of newborn, they have to work on both issues at the same time.
DeleteWill the problem of overpopulation in Cairo be solved by building the new city? I think it will. For me, it is the best solution to reduce the crowed area. According to the video, the people there believe in having many children would help them create many incomes. With this belief, I think it is quite challenging for the government and the responsible organizations to solve the overpopulation by other ways. Therefore, the most effective way to deal with it is to build a new city that might have better infrastructure to accommodate the growing populations.
ReplyDeleteI think moving the administrative and financial centers can facilitate the new city and the city of Cairo. It can support the organizations and the people when they need to manage their works. Since we have the Internet and advanced technologies, I think the distances between the two cities cannot be a problem. Of course, the new city is attractive to many people.
I actually agree with you that people there are having several children as a source of income. In fact, I think that building a new city would help overcome overpopulation; however, I do not think it is a solution that solves the matter efficiently. I think campaigning to the young population not to follow the traditions of their parents, along side with building a new city would help with the problem
DeleteI think that bulding the new city will help to solve the problems of overpopulation in Cairo a lot. From the statistics I heard from the video, It told that they need double of economics growth rate compared with those of the population to sustain the city’s economic.Next, we also knew from the clip that one main cause of population come with an international migration. These make me think that there are still many unemployees in Cairo. Apart from the inappropriate relation between the expanse of economic and that of population, I found that the another problem in Cairo is that there are still hundreds of slums who lack of basic amenities. Building the new capital will not only provide more jobs for the unemployee but also provide many millions of housing with appropriate basic amenities. These could help the problems stated above a lot. It’s not matter whether the citizen will the think their new capital is attractive or not but the point is it can help a lot for the existing problem involved overpopulation.
ReplyDeleteI think so too! Building another new city will definitely solve both unemployment and overpopulation at the same time.
DeleteThis plan is going to create many job position for them by building infrastructures at the new city. Consequently, many people tend to move to there for a new job opportunity and this migration also reduce overpopulation at their capital city simultaneously.
Building the new city won't be solve an overpopulation in Cairo. This is just another way to create a new empty space waiting for people to be crowded again. Even though the government will move administrative and financial centers to a new town, the population will not be reduced beside that it will be attracted more people to move in. Of course many people move out from Cairo to a new place. Resulting in the reduction of population but it just a temporary. It's just another way of population transferring process since the city are expanded. This is not a way to shrinking the city. New city is a new oasis for the citizen, people eager to move in because everything new and modern. However, when time pass the new city will crowded and becomes slums again as everyone want to be here.
ReplyDeleteFrom your idea of moving new captial is a solution for the problems of overpopulation in Cairo, I’m quite agree that these can’t solve all of them but I’m not sure that the new capital is so attractive that everyone want to be there.
DeleteThe new capital do provide good basic amenities,better shelters and chance to get jobs for the unemployees. I thinks that this still cannot weight enough to convince the Cairo’s citizens to move to the new capital. No one would want to leave their families and friends to the far away places. Does the new city povide a traditional markets or anything the elder getting used to is still questioned. That’s why I think it takes time for the next generation to find the new city attractable.
I would like to propose another view that it appears that in order to battle with overcrowded city, building another new city is one of common solutions used in many countries such as Korea, Indonesia. Looking back to Cairo, I believe this city was not originally designed for 22 million people living in so it would be better if there is a new well-planned city with sufficient fundamental amenities to share some amounts of people from Cairo.
DeleteBuilding Cairo's new capital might be a too straightforward solution for the overpopulation issue. People head to Cairo because they are seeking jobs or life opportunities, therefore, the new city might not be a strong attractive place for them. Resident buildings are certainly constructed there but what about jobs? As I have heard, Egypt has a lot of young citizens. It should have positive impacts on the economic growth rate because of having plenty of workforces. Job opportunities may not be sufficient for them.
ReplyDeleteMoving the administrative and financial centres requires a huge amount of funds and I do not think it is going to be worth it. Traffic congestion might be severest. The reason is that If the former employees do not relocate their house, they tend to commute 45 KM. to work every day.
I do agree with your idea about the eagerness of the citizens to move to the new captial but my reasons of it are quite different from yours. After the new city is fully finished, there will be new contructions such as hospitals, shops,department stores, schools and somethings else which could provide many jobs for the current unemployees in Cairo. I think that the citizen still not want to move to new captial because they don’t want to leave their families, friends and also their current socials. One who live in a big familly may not want to leave their ancestors. Does the new city povide a traditional markets or anything the elder getting used to is still questioned. These are the reason which make I think it takes time for the next generation to find the new city looks attractable.
DeletePhing your point of view does match with my lifestyle a lot especially the part that people commute 45 KM. to work every day. I am one person among those group. Everything stuck in the central. Good school, high salary job, for example. In my aspect travel for 45 Km. a day is not much of problem because I drive. I can travel easily. However, there are price to pay. I have lost a lot of time to commute from town to town. Each month I have gasoline as a regular cost to pay for. I want to move to the city but the accommodation renting is expensive than I pay for the gas. One way that could control people is to provide the job and also other facility to them to live like there are in the city. The economic of the town is the imperative conflict that the government really need to focus on. Chiangmai and Chonburi are the role model of towns that have strong economic statuses. Many citizen move there because they can find jobs. So the key thing to concern the most is the economic of the town itself that makes people to move in.
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