Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 2 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · IELTS Summit Mastery · 2026-09-30

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)

Tourism is growing very fastly nowadays and it is a major source of money for many country. However, tourism also causes many problems for local culture and nature, but people usually ignoring them. I completely agree with this opinion because tourism creates pollution and changes local traditions.

First of all, tourism creates a lot of environmental problems. When many people visit a tourist place, they throw trash on the roads and beaches. This makes the environment dirty and ruin natural beauty. For example, in many famous beach places, plastic waste and pollution kill ocean animals and destroy coral reefs. Also, governments build big modern hotels and roads in forests, which cuts down many trees. Governments ignore these problems because they want to earn more money from tourists.

Secondly, tourism damages local cultures and old customs. When foreign tourists come, local people start changing there traditional lifestyle to copy them. Traditional dances, clothes, and festivals become just a business entertainment to make quick money. Furthermore, small local shops and cultural markets are replaced by international fast-food restaurants and hotels. Because of this, unique historic towns lose their original traditions and local culture slowly disappears.

In conclusion, I agree that the damage of tourism to nature and local culture is often ignored by people. Money is important, but governments should also take steps to protect nature and local traditions for the future.

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 5.5

The response addresses all parts of the prompt by stating a clear position of complete agreement and supporting it with arguments regarding both the environment and local culture. Ideas such as waste generation, habitat destruction, and the commercialisation of traditions are relevant and extended with examples like plastic waste killing ocean animals. However, the response has a significant drawback regarding length: it contains only 230 words, falling short of the mandatory 250-word minimum requirement. This under-length impacts the full development of ideas and directly pulls down the score for this criterion. Because of the length penalty and slightly limited depth in the body paragraphs, the response sits comfortably within the Band 5.5 to 6.0 range. While the position is clear and supported, the word count constraint prevents it from achieving a higher band.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 5.5

The essay displays a coherent overall arrangement with a clear introduction, two distinct body paragraphs focusing on separate issues, and a concise conclusion. Paragraphing is used appropriately to separate environmental impacts from cultural ones. Cohesive devices are employed to guide the reader through the text, such as "First of all," "Secondly," and "In conclusion." However, some cohesion feels mechanical and referencing is occasionally flawed, as seen in the phrase "changing there traditional lifestyle" where the pronoun and possessive choices are imprecise. Despite these minor lapses in cohesive mechanics and referencing, the logical progression is generally maintained throughout the text, allowing the reader to follow the writer's arguments without significant difficulty, which fully satisfies the requirements for Band 6.0.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.5

The student uses an adequate range of vocabulary for the task, attempting some less common and topic-specific items such as "commercialisation," "coral reefs," "customs," and "international fast-food restaurants." However, there are noticeable word choice and collocation errors throughout the essay. For instance, the adverbial form "fastly" is incorrect and should be "rapidly" or "fast," and the phrase "there traditional lifestyle" contains a homophone spelling error ("there" instead of "their"). Furthermore, expressions like "famous beach places" are rather basic and repetitive. While these lexical inaccuracies do not severely impede communication, they reflect a limited control over less common vocabulary items, placing the performance firmly at Band 6.0.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.5

The writer demonstrates a mix of simple and complex sentence forms, utilizing relative clauses and conditional structures such as "When many people visit a tourist place, they throw trash on the roads..." and "Governments ignore these problems because they want to earn more money..." Grammatical accuracy is mixed; while many simple sentences are clear, errors emerge in subject-verb agreement and word forms, such as "many country" (should be "countries") and "people usually ignoring them" (missing the auxiliary verb "are"). Punctuation is generally acceptable, and while these errors are noticeable, they rarely impede overall communication. The combination of attempted complex structures alongside persistent grammatical slips corresponds precisely to the Band 6 descriptor.

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