Simon’s ielts writing task 2

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Simon
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IELTS Writing Task 2
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Saturday, September 10, 2016 
Students' questions about my essay 
People asked some useful questions in the comments below the 
essay
I shared on Wednesday. I'll 
try to answer them here. If you don't like grammar, don't read number 1 below! 
1) When writing about our planet, should we write: 
Earth
, 
earth
, 
the Earth
 or 
the earth
?
To be honest, this confuses native speakers and you'll see it written in different ways. I wrote "life on 
Earth" and "the Earth's climate", and I've found plenty of examples of both phrases written in this way, 
in publications such as National Geographic. However, I've also found both phrases written with the 

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Compiled by Diyorbek Hayitmurodov ielts-simon.com Page 158 
lower case "e" (earth). If you read the grammar rules on a website like 
this one
, you'll probably be 
even more confused. Either way, you won't lose any marks in the IELTS test, so don't worry too much 
about this. 
Note:
After reading about the grammar rules myself, I'll probably follow the convention of writing 
"Earth" without "the" when I'm using it as a proper noun (name). Following this rule, I would write 
"Earth's climate" instead of "the Earth's climate". 
2) Does "Try to limit the contribution" mean "make every effort" or "make little effort"?
It means "make every effort to limit the contribution". 
3) Should we write "represents a threat" or "presents a threat"?
Both are possible, but "represents a threat" is a very common collocation, and has more results on 
Google.