Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 2 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · IELTS Academic Practice Accelerator · 2026-09-15

IELTS Writing Task 2 question

Smoking can cause serious illnesses and should be made illegal.

To what extent do you agree?

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

Student answer (Band 5.5)

Smoking is spreading rapidly day by day and it also has a lot of effects on health. Now a days, it has become a serious issue in our society that must be controlled. Smoking can also cause serious illnesses that's why i think that smoking must be illegal. I completely agree with this statement that smoking must be illegal or prohabited.

From my prospective, if government don't take action timely, this problem can lead to destruction. Sadely smoking has a power to destroy our society as well as it can destroy our nation. It created a burden on our nation hence it must be strictly prohabited. Many childeren are involving in this habit day by day. In the age of study, they often seen in bad habits because of their elders.

Secondly, smoking can cause many health diseases in our society. For instance, it can cause heart attack, lung cancer, colestrol or many diseases related to lungs. Blood pressure of smoker is always seen high and it is very common disease amoung smokers that have been seen in almost every smoker. High blood pressure can damage kidney. We can't ignore the cons of smoking. That's the main reason why smoking must prohabited. Government should not allow the companies to sell their products freely. It must be removed from the market as drugs. It is a kind of drugs hence, we must avoid using ciggerates.

In conclusion, ciggerates became a dashion amoung younge people. Mostly children start using ciggerates as an adventure but after some thime they become adicted. So, we should promote the deterimental mental effects of smoking amoung students or other people.

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response — Band 6.0

The response addresses the prompt by clearly stating a position that smoking should be made illegal due to its health and societal impacts. The writer presents relevant ideas, such as health diseases (lung cancer, heart attacks) and the impact on youth, fulfilling the basic requirements of Task 2. However, the development of these ideas is somewhat limited and repetitive, leaning on generalisations without deep elaboration or specific examples beyond generic medical conditions. The position is maintained throughout, but the arguments lack the extension and depth characteristic of higher band levels. Therefore, this performance aligns closely with the Band 6 descriptors, where all parts of the task are addressed, but some ideas remain under-developed.

Coherence and Cohesion — Band 5.0

The essay displays a generally coherent overall arrangement with a recognizable attempt at paragraphing introduction, body, and conclusion. Basic cohesive devices and transition signals are used, such as 'Secondly', 'For instance', and 'In conclusion'. However, cohesion is often faulty or mechanical. For example, 'Sadely smoking has a power...' and abrupt sentence transitions disrupt the smooth flow of ideas. Paragraphing is visible, but internal referencing and logical progression between sentences can be disjointed. The misuse of single-sentence paragraphs and frequent punctuation errors also pull down the structural cohesion. These features place the response firmly at Band 5.0.

Lexical Resource — Band 5.0

The student uses an adequate range of vocabulary for the task, attempting some less common words and health-related terminology such as 'colestrol', 'lung cancer', and 'detrimental'. However, there are frequent spelling errors ('prohabited', 'childeren', 'involving' instead of involved, 'amoung', 'colestrol', 'ciggerates', 'younge', 'thime', 'adicted') and word choice inaccuracies that reveal limitations. While communication is not severely impeded, the high frequency of spelling mistakes and awkward collocations prevent the lexical resource from achieving a Band 6, keeping it at a Band 5.0 level.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy — Band 5.0

The writer attempts a mix of simple and complex sentence forms, such as conditional structures ('if government don't take action timely, this problem can lead to destruction'). However, there are frequent grammatical errors throughout the text, including subject-verb agreement issues ('government don't', 'ciggerates became'), article omissions, and tense inconsistencies. Punctuation errors are also notable, such as the lowercase 'i' used for the pronoun. While some sentences are clear and understandable, the accumulation of grammatical errors causes occasional difficulty for the reader and prevents the writing from reaching Band 6, warranting a Band 5.0 score.

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

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