Many people believe that a member of the family is more important than a friend.

We start our lives with our family and during different stages of our lives, we find some friends. Some people like to have many friends and some have only one, two or three friends. For some people their friends are more important then their families but I think that our families’ importance is more than that of our friends.

To begin, we change our friend during different stages of our lives but we can not change our family specially our parents. We also have different types of friends. We find some friend in university and some friends at work. Some of them are important for us and we prefer to spend more times with them and some of them are not so important. But usually when we change our environment, our relationship starts to fade. For instance, I had a very good friend in university and I liked him. When we finished our university I started to work and he went to France for his PHD. So, I can not relate with him except some times via telegram.

Furthermore, some members of our families are very important and we can not compare these types of relationship with those of our friends. We were born from our mothers and so we inherited much of our character traits from our parents. We also live with our wife many years. Therefore, I think that these three members of our families are more important than all of our friends because they have very important role in our lives. For example, I have married about 6 years ago and I have a warm relation with my wife. I also go to my mother’s home 3 times a week and I think I spend a big fraction of my time with my family rather than my friend.

To sum up, although I do not deny the importance of our friends in our lives, I think our families have more effect in our lives.

TOEFL listening discussions: An assistant lecturer talking to a new student

Hi Mahdi, your writing is clear and relevant to the prompt. Your vocabulary is pretty basic though and your examples could be a little more detailed. Overall your essay is pretty short. Still, your ideas are solid and your arguments are convincing.