Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 2 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · Barron's Writing · 2026-09-27

IELTS Writing Task 2 question

A growing number of people rely on restaurants and convenience food (frozen food and packaged meals) rather than home-cooked food to supply most of their meals.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of eating this way?

Give reasons for your answer, and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Student answer (Band 5.5)

It was noted that most people are prefering restaurant and convenience food like frozen foods and packaged meals instead of home-cooked food.

Its mainly due to its convience and time saving like whenever a person feel hungary they can visit any nearby restaurant and order themselves a meal for instance fast food is most common its cheap and can be found anywhere, and for the frozen food literally every other person have some frozen food or packaged meals in their homes they just put that in oven or fry them over a pan and boom food is ready.

Well there are alot of advantages of convience food and restaurant food for example it really save time, it saves from hustle and grocery shopping but it also have downsides too, one of the major drawback of relying solely on restaurants and packaged food is that its not really healty like a person can never know whats the quality of food he is consuming,is the oil clean and regularly changed, another issue is its very costly a typical home-cooked meal just cost about 10 dollars less or more but its definately in that range but a simple and filling mean in a restaurant cost as much as 20 to 50 dollars

If we talk about packaged and frozen food a small box of nuggets cost more than 15 dollars so its highly expensive and its definately hard on your pocket, eating out few times in a month is acceptable but eating out regularly and relying on packaged meals or frozen food pays a heavy toll on your health and pocket.

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 5.5

The response addresses all parts of the task by discussing both the advantages and disadvantages of eating restaurant and convenience food. The writer presents clear ideas, noting benefits such as time-saving and convenience, alongside drawbacks like health concerns and high costs. However, the development of these ideas is somewhat limited and relies on sweeping generalisations rather than deep elaboration, which prevents the essay from reaching higher bands. For example, claims regarding the exact price of home-cooked meals versus restaurant food are introduced without sufficient nuance. The position is clear throughout, but the depth of support places this response firmly in Band 6.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 5.0

The response has a coherent overall arrangement and follows a logical path from introduction to advantages and disadvantages. However, the paragraphing is a significant weakness; the entire body of the essay is compressed into two excessively long paragraphs, making the text difficult to navigate visually. Furthermore, cohesive devices are often faulty or mechanical, relying on conversational transitions like 'Well' and run-on punctuation without appropriate conjunctions or full stops, as seen in 'its cheap and can be found anywhere, and for the frozen food literally every other person have...'. Referencing and logical progression are occasionally obscured by these structural issues, resulting in a Band 5 performance for this criterion.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.5

The student demonstrates an adequate range of vocabulary for the task, successfully using terms such as 'convenience food', 'packaged meals', 'solely', and 'drawback'. However, there are noticeable spelling and word-choice errors throughout the text, including 'prefering', 'convience', 'hungary', 'healty', and 'definately'. These errors do not seriously impede communication, as the reader can easily grasp the intended meaning, but they restrict the lexical score. The vocabulary is generally functional rather than sophisticated, featuring repetitive phrases like 'restaurant food' and 'convenience food', which aligns with the Band 6 descriptor.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.0

The writer attempts a mix of simple and complex sentence forms, but control over grammar and punctuation is weak. The text contains frequent run-on sentences and comma splices, such as 'fast food is most common its cheap and can be found anywhere'. Subject-verb agreement and auxiliary usage errors are also present, as demonstrated in 'every other person have' and 'a typical home-cooked meal just cost'. Punctuation is largely neglected, with missing apostrophes ('whats', 'doesnt' implied) and a general lack of terminal full stops in long clauses. These persistent grammatical errors place the response at Band 5.

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