Consider the following comments on ageing.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
Mark Twain
A society that hides its old has forgotten where it is going.
We treat ageing as a disease and then wonder why the old feel like a burden.
Youth is worshipped most loudly by the industries that profit from its loss.
Every culture decides whether age is a summit or a cliff, and the elderly live inside that decision.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that how a society treats ageing reveals what it truly values, and that the modern worship of youth is less a preference than a market. Open by granting that the fear of decline is human and that ageing brings real loss, not merely a change of perspective. Then complicate it: much of what we call the tragedy of ageing is manufactured by industries and institutions that profit from treating age as a defect to be corrected. A strong third move contrasts cultures that locate authority in the old with those that exile them, asking what each gains and loses. Caution: resist both the sentimentality that pretends ageing is purely wisdom and serenity, and the cruelty that reduces a long life to obsolescence.