Band 9 essay sample about hand-made and machine-made goods

IELTS essay topic

Some products can be made quickly by machines. Other items take long time to be made by hand. As a buyer which do you prefer and why?

Give specific details and examples for your answer.

Sample essay

There are mainly two ways for producing things – using hands and using machines. Machine manufacturing is faster and more economical. Even so I prefer hand-made products because when things are made by hand, each one is unique in its own way. Machine-made goods lack this uniqueness.

The biggest advantage of machine manufacturing is that it is faster. Also machine-made goods are cheaper than hand-made goods. Using machines we can produce tens of thousands of identical copies of an object in a short amount of time. This makes machine manufacturing ideal for mass production. To produce an equal number of products using hands, a company will have to hire thousands of people.

On the other hand, the initial cost of setting up a factory is pretty high in the case of machine manufacturing and it may take several months or even years to recover the investment. By contrast when goods are made by hands, the labour costs may be higher but other expenses are negligible. As a result, even if one does not have a lot of money to invest, one can easily launch a business of manufacturing hand-made goods.

There is yet another advantage to producing goods by hand. They look unique, elegant and desirable. For example, Switzerland is famous for the production of hand-made watches which are well known in all parts of the globe for their accuracy and charm. Likewise, hand-made silk saris produced in Banaras are cherished by millions of Indian women for their meticulous details. If hand-woven fabrics are compared with machine-made fabrics, the former will look and feel superior to the latter. This is because of the creativity with which hand-made goods are made.

To conclude, in my perspectives as a buyer, hand-made items are superior to machine-made goods in several ways. Of course, machine manufacturing certainly has some advantages but machine-made goods cannot beat hand-made goods in quality or elegance.