Consider the following comments on money.
Money is a tool that obeys its owner and a master that owns the careless.
A society reveals what it truly believes not in its sermons but in its prices.
The lack of money is the root of all evil.
George Bernard Shaw
We pretend money cannot buy happiness so the comfortable need not feel guilty and the poor need not feel cheated.
Wealth measured against a neighbour's wealth can never be enough.
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 money is neither the corrupting force moralists fear nor the neutral tool economists describe, but an amplifier that magnifies whatever a person and a society already are. Open by honouring its usefulness, that money lets strangers cooperate, stores effort across time and frees people from dependence and want. Then complicate it: because money measures so much, we drift into letting it measure everything, including worth, attention and care, which it was never built to price. A strong third move distinguishes the security that lifts people out of fear from the accumulation that has no destination beyond more. Caution: resist the comfortable pieties on both sides, since claiming money does not matter usually betrays a person who has never gone without it.