Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 1 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · Cambridge IELTS 19 · 2026-10-01

IELTS Writing Task 1 question

The plans below show a harbour in 2000 and how it looks today.

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

 

 

Student answer (Band 5.5)

The plans here illustrates a Porth harbour depicting how was it in 2000 as compared to today.

The Porth harbour has gone through drastic changes throughout this time period. As it can be seen from the plans that there are quite visible changes in these two time period. Starting from the main road which had one entrance to car parking initially and the other car aprking was one the side road from the main road in 2000 but now both the parkings are located on the main road both equiped with showers and toilets. As we move on towards the life boat there is now new cafes and shops beside it. The castle is transformed into hotel and the public beach is now a private beach for the hotel.

The locations of fishing boats and marina are switched with each others as of today. There is also an addition in Docks and its capacity has been incread from before. Overall the poth harbour remains same.

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 6.0

The response addresses the main parts of the task by covering several key transformations between the two maps, such as the switching of the marina and fishing boats, the addition of the hotel, and the modifications to the car parks and docks. However, some aspects are under-developed or imprecise, such as stating that 'overall the poth harbour remains same,' which contradicts the earlier description of drastic changes and misinterprets the extent of the alterations shown on the maps. While a clear overview of general change is attempted, the selection of features could be more thoroughly reported and extended to fully satisfy higher band requirements.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 5.5

The text demonstrates a coherent overall arrangement and attempts to sequence the spatial changes logically from the entrance and road areas towards the interior and coastline. However, the organisation is hampered by poor paragraphing, as the entire body of the report is clumped into two overly dense blocks with run-on sentences. Cohesive devices are sometimes mechanical or faulty, such as repetitive transitions like 'As we move on towards' and vague referencing like 'switched with each others as of today', which disrupts the smooth progression of information across the text.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.5

The vocabulary used is minimally adequate for the task, with attempts to incorporate less common items and subject-specific terms such as 'marina', 'passenger ferries', and 'lifeboat'. However, there are noticeable lexical inaccuracies, inappropriate word choices, and spelling errors, such as 'illustrates a Porth harbour' (article error/unnecessary article), 'car aprking', 'equiped', 'incread', and 'poth'. These errors do not seriously impede communication, but they reflect a limited and occasionally imprecise lexical range that prevents the response from achieving a higher band.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.0

The writing displays a mix of simple and complex sentence forms, though attempts at complex structures frequently contain errors. There are frequent mistakes in article usage, such as 'illustrates a Porth harbour' and 'transformed into hotel', as well as prepositional and structural errors like 'how was it in 2000' and 'switched with each others'. Punctuation and verb tense shifts are also somewhat inconsistent. While the reader can generally follow the intended meaning, the accumulation of grammatical errors across different structures keeps the accuracy level restricted.

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

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