Nowadays more and more jobs and tasks are done by machines which involve hard physical work. Do the positive effects of this trend outweigh the negative effects? 

（题目来源：2015年11月19日大陆雅思大作文）

题目大意

现如今，越来越多的需要大量体力的工作和任务是由机器完成的。你认为这一趋势是利大于弊还是弊大于利？

写作思路

机器取代人工劳动，我们能想到它的好处是机器将人们从繁重的劳动中解放出来，因此人们可以有更多的精力和时间去做其它的事情；而且由于它的效率高，成本低，也能够减少企业生产的成本；除此之外，一个明显的好处就是由于不用人工参与，因此也是相对比较安全。

然而，它对应的弊端也是非常明显，比如由于人工被机器取代，那么失业问题就会加重；除此之外，如果人们过分依赖机器，一旦机器不能被使用，那么生产和生活就会被严重影响。

高分范文

The advanced technologies are massively used in many aspects nowadays, and they can complete many things that used to be done by human labour. From my perspective, though it has some potential shortcomings, this development can be regarded as positive.

On the one hand, the benefits of robots are undeniable. Firstly, robots can perform some risky task for human beings such as mining and exploration in extreme conditions. In this way, people’s security can be greatly enhanced if these perilous tasks are undertaken by them. Secondly, robots can work more efficiently and accurately than their human counterparts. The workload which could take days to finish by manual work could be done by robot faultlessly within several minutes. For example, when assembling the micro electronic devices, robots undoubtably accomplish this task much better than human. Since being substituted, human beings have more time and energy to fulfill other tasks or enjoy longer leisure time.

On the other hand, the downsides of too much reliance on robots cannot be ignored. The most obvious one is the decline of employment rate. Since the incomparable efficiency robots possess, different industries are gradually replacing human labour. Because of the adoption of robots, thousands of works are dismissed from their work and they have to seek other occupations. In addition, if people are overly dependent on these machines, our society will fall into the chaos once robots cannot function normally, not only for the industrial production but also people’s daily lives.

To sum up, although robots may bring the problems like reducing job opportunities and over reliance on them, they do make the production more efficient and free people from heavy work.