Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 2 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · IELTS Summit Mastery · 2026-08-04

IELTS Writing Task 2 question

Tourism is one of the fastest growing industries and contributes a great deal to economies around the world. However, the damage tourism can cause to local cultures and the environment is often ignored.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

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

Student answer (Band 5.5)

In modern term, tourism is the fastest growing industry and contribute a great deal to economies around the world. Although people often forget that tourism damage local culture and nature. In my opinion, I strongly agree with this statement that negative impacts of tourism in local culture and the environment are critically overlooked.

To begin with, tourism play most important role in country economies and wealth, also, local people get benefit from accommodations, food and travel. Reversely, we face environmental problem because for attract tourist government destroy wild trees and make there accommodations and some museum or temple. Furthermore, making roads beautiful roads along with hotels, resorts and recreation facilities. In other world, natural environment sacrifice to create modern facilities for tourism. As a result, there is a significant effect on ecosystem and wild animals loses their homes. Beautiful natural placeless stay forever. For example, in Goa, many beachfront hotels dump plastic trash and dirty water directly onto the beaches.

Furthermore, another important reason is tourism ruins our culture and destroy it. This is because local people change their customs to earn money from foreigners. For example, people now ruins show and dance which are related to other country instead of their culture, also, people sell food which are sins in our culture just because of money. In other world, people sell cheap entertainment tickets in our country.

In my point of view, tourism gives us significant damage and destroy our culture things. So we should have to consider our culture and environment. After that, we have to look for tourism and money.

In conclusion, I strongly agree that the negative impact of tourism on local culture and the environment are critically overlooked.

AI examiner evaluation

CriterionBand
Task Achievement / Task Response5.5
Coherence and Cohesion5.5
Lexical Resource5.5
Grammatical Range and Accuracy5.5
Overall5.5

Task Achievement / Task Response — Band 5.5

The response addresses the prompt and maintains a clear position throughout. The ideas regarding environmental degradation and cultural erosion are relevant. However, the development is somewhat limited; the points are stated but lack depth or sophisticated analysis. For instance, the example of Goa is a good start, but the explanation of how tourism impacts culture remains quite general and repetitive. To reach a higher band, you should aim to provide more nuanced arguments and ensure that each supporting point is fully explored rather than just listed. The conclusion effectively restates your position, but the overall development remains at a basic level.

Coherence and Cohesion — Band 5.5

The essay is organized into clear paragraphs, which helps the reader follow the argument. There is a logical progression from the introduction to the body paragraphs and the conclusion. However, the use of cohesive devices is often mechanical or inaccurate. Phrases like 'Reversely' and 'In other world' (intended as 'In other words') are used incorrectly or awkwardly, which disrupts the flow. While the paragraphing is appropriate, the internal cohesion within paragraphs could be improved by using a wider variety of linking words more naturally. The referencing is generally clear, but the overall management of cohesion is somewhat basic.

Lexical Resource — Band 5.5

The vocabulary is adequate for the task but lacks the range and precision required for higher bands. You rely on simple, repetitive phrasing such as 'destroy our culture' and 'make money'. There are also several instances of word-choice errors, such as 'natural placeless stay forever' and 'people now ruins show', which impede clarity. While you attempt to use topic-specific vocabulary like 'ecosystem' and 'recreation facilities', the overall control is inconsistent. To improve, focus on learning collocations and more sophisticated synonyms to express your ideas with greater precision and variety.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy — Band 5.5

The essay contains a mix of simple and complex sentence structures, but there are frequent grammatical errors throughout. Common issues include subject-verb agreement ('tourism play', 'animals loses'), missing articles, and incorrect preposition usage. For example, 'tourism damage local culture' should be 'tourism damages local culture'. While these errors do not completely prevent the reader from understanding your message, they are frequent enough to be noticeable and impact the overall quality of the writing. You should focus on proofreading for basic grammatical accuracy, particularly verb tenses and pluralization, to improve your score.

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

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