Précis: A passage on the future of work in an automated economy
Subtopic: Section B · Précis
How to structure your answer
Source passage (~700 words): the candidate will receive a passage arguing that the question 'will there be enough jobs?' is the wrong question. The right questions are: what kind of jobs, at what wage, with what security, and for whom? The passage will discuss the shift from career employment to portfolio work, the rise of gig platforms, the unbundling of benefits from jobs, and the policy response — portable benefits, hours-based protections rather than employer-based ones, a minimum floor below which platforms cannot bid down rates. It will close with the claim that the durable design choice is to attach rights to the worker, not to the job.
Approach: précis to ~240 words. The passage's central re-framing — wrong question vs right questions — must survive. Compress the four sub-questions into one sentence. The policy response must keep three of its four elements; the closing 'attach rights to the worker' line must be retained verbatim in meaning.
What an examiner expects: a noun-phrase title; the re-framing preserved at the top; the closing principle preserved at the bottom; one paragraph; word count in brackets.
Common pitfalls: (1) summarising the four sub-questions one by one and exhausting the word budget; (2) misreading 'attach rights to the worker' as 'attach rights to the job'; (3) inserting examples of specific gig platforms.
Detailed model answer
532 words · target 250 words · 25 min
Sample original passage: The future of work has been the subject of so many anxious essays that the topic itself has acquired a slight air of cliché. Beneath the noise, however, lies a real and unfinished question: what does a society owe its working population when the technologies of automation can produce material output without proportionate human labour? Earlier waves of automation displaced workers but generally created, with a lag, new categories of employment that absorbed them. The lag was painful — coal villages, declining textile towns, the rust belts of advanced economies — but the eventual recovery was, at least in aggregate, real. The present wave is different in three ways. First, the technologies displace not muscle but cognition, eroding the middle of the income distribution rather than its bottom. Second, the speed of diffusion is unprecedented; what took decades in earlier transitions now takes years. Third, the gains accrue disproportionately to the owners of capital and intellectual property, rather than to the workers whose previous productivity grew alongside the machines they operated. The policy response cannot rest on the assumption that displacement will be temporary and benign. It must include four components: a system of continuous learning that adults can access through their working lives; a portable benefits architecture that survives the dissolution of long-term employment; an industrial policy that distributes ownership of new technologies more widely than market outcomes alone would deliver; and a tax system that captures the returns to data and algorithms as labour-derived value diminishes. A society that fails to redesign its compact with its workers in the face of such a transition will not preserve social peace; one that succeeds will find that the dividends of automation can in fact be widely shared.
Model précis (≈ 240 words): The future of work raises an unfinished question beneath much repeated commentary: what does a society owe its workers when automation can produce material output without proportionate human labour? Earlier waves of automation displaced workers but eventually generated new categories of employment that absorbed them, even where the intervening adjustment was painful for coal villages, textile towns and the rust belts. The present transition differs in three ways. It displaces cognition rather than muscle, hollowing the middle of the income distribution rather than its bottom. The speed of diffusion is unprecedented, compressing into years what earlier transitions took decades to complete. The gains accrue disproportionately to the owners of capital and intellectual property rather than to workers whose productivity once rose alongside the machines they operated. Policy cannot rest on the assumption that displacement will be temporary and benign. It must include four components. A system of continuous learning must be available to adults through their working lives, not only through formal schooling. A portable benefits architecture must survive the dissolution of long-term employment, decoupling protection from any single employer. An industrial policy must distribute ownership of new technologies more widely than market outcomes alone would deliver. A tax system must capture the returns to data and algorithms as labour-derived value diminishes. A society that fails to redesign its compact with workers will not preserve social peace; one that succeeds will find the dividends of automation can be widely shared.
What an examiner expects to see
- Target word count: 230-250.
- Title: 'Re-framing the Question of Work'.
- Compress the four sub-questions into one sentence with a list.
- Keep at least three of the four policy elements (portable benefits, hours-based protections, minimum floor).
- Preserve the closing principle: rights attach to the worker, not the job.
- Third person; indirect speech.
- Single paragraph; word count in brackets.
- Drop brand names of platforms; use 'gig platforms'.
- Avoid contractions; precis register is formal.
- Use 'consequently' and 'in response' as transition words.
Concrete cases, schemes and judgments
- Re-framing line: 'The author argues that asking whether jobs will be enough is the wrong question; the right questions are what kind of jobs, at what wage, with what security, and for whom.'
- Compression of policy response: 'The author urges three design choices — portable benefits, hours-based protections, and a minimum floor below which platforms cannot bid down rates.'
- Closing thesis: 'The author concludes that the durable design choice is to attach rights to the worker, not to the job.'
- Title example: 'Re-framing the Question of Work'. Word count: '(241 words)'.