Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 1 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · Recent IELTS Exams (Canada & India) · 2026-09-26

IELTS Writing Task 1 question

The pie charts below show how working adults in a particular country spent their time in 1958 and 2008.

Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

* Note: these aren’t the original diagrams given in the test, they were recreated for the purpose of demonstration.

Student answer (Band 5.5)

The chart illustrates how adults in a specific country spent their time performing different tasks in 1958 and 2008.

Overall, work significantly dominated their routine. It increased over time with travelling, and relaxing at home, whilst going out with friends or family, and sleep lost their span. However, the time for playing sports remained same throughout.

The three most done activities in 1958 were working, sleeping, and going out with friends or family with 33%, 32%, and 19%, respectively. While work increased dramatically to 42% in 2008, but going out strictly declined to 6%, and do did sleep to 25%.

Traveling to work was at 2% in 1958 that steadily increased to 7% in 2008. While most of them activties faced increased or decraese in their performances, playing sports

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 5.0

The response covers the main features of the charts, providing an appropriate overview that highlights key trends such as the increase in working hours and decrease in sleep. Proportional data is cited accurately for major categories like working (33% to 42%) and sleeping (32% to 25%). However, the text suffers from a significant drawback regarding length, containing only 129 words, which falls below the mandatory 150-word minimum requirement. Furthermore, the response trails off abruptly at the end ('playing sports...'), meaning that the final piece of data regarding sports was incomplete. Consequently, Task Achievement is penalised for under-length and incomplete development.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 5.5

The response attempts a clear overall structure with an introduction, an overview, and body paragraphs. Cohesive devices such as 'Whilst', 'However', 'While', and 'respectively' are utilised to establish contrasts between the two years. Nevertheless, paragraphing is underdeveloped, and referencing becomes problematic at the end where the sentence breaks off mid-thought. While logical progression is visible in the first half, the mechanical transitions and incomplete final sentence prevent the text from achieving a higher band in this criterion.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.5

The writer demonstrates an adequate range of vocabulary for the task, successfully employing terms like 'illustrates', 'significantly dominated', 'dramatically', and 'steadily increased'. There are some awkward collocations and lexical errors, such as 'lost their span', 'most done activities', and 'do did sleep', which detract from the overall precision. Despite these lapses, the vocabulary is minimally adequate to convey the intended meaning and trends depicted in the charts.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.5

The student attempts a mix of simple and complex sentence structures, including subordinate clauses introduced by 'how', 'whilst', and 'while'. Control over grammar is mixed; while several sentences are constructed correctly, there are notable grammatical errors and awkward phrasing, such as 'remained same throughout', 'going out strictly declined', and the unfinished final clause. Punctuation is generally acceptable, but grammatical accuracy is inconsistent enough to cause some slight strain for the reader.

See this exact question answered at other band scores. The same prompt compared across bands.

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