Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 1 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · IELTS Complete Catalyst · 2026-09-28

IELTS Writing Task 1 question

The bar charts and line graph below show the results of a survey conducted over a three-year period to discover what people who live in London think of the city.

Write a report for a university lecturer describing the information below.

What are the best things about living in London?

Student answer (Band 5.5)

The graph and bar chart illustrates the advantage and drawbacks of people living in London as a result of survey of three years time period .

Overall , it can be seen that variety of shop is the leading factor amongst the advantages where as cost of living and crime rate are consider as a headache for the citizen over the given period . Moreover air quality and noise pollution reduces over the period while litter observe surge and fall over the period .

Range of shops remains favourable for 45% people in the survey . People love the Job opportunites , mixture of people and museums nearly 30-40% . Night life and transport stays least admirable for the people accounts for 20-30%. However cost of living , traffic and crime became an issue for the citizen around 50-60% but reduction can be seen over the period . 30-40% of the citizen is worried for the housing cost and transport .

As per the graph decline in air qualitry and noise pollution from 70 and 60% is satisfactory for the participant where as a rise of 5% litter in a year is disturbing as a major problem .

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 5.5

The response covers all parts of the task by addressing the best and worst things about living in London as well as the survey on problems such as air quality, noise, and litter. An overview is successfully attempted in the second paragraph, identifying key highlights like the range of shops being a leading advantage and the cost of living being a primary drawback. However, some data points are generalised rather than precisely detailed (e.g. 'nearly 30-40%'), and there are occasional slight misinterpretations of the charts, but the main trends are adequately reported. The response meets the core requirements of academic task 1.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 5.5

The response is arranged into logical paragraphs with an introduction, an overview, and body paragraphs detailing specific data points. Cohesive devices such as 'Overall', 'Moreover', and 'However' are used to connect ideas, though some transitions feel a bit mechanical or forced. Paragraphing is present, but the body paragraphs are somewhat dense and could be broken down more effectively. Referencing is generally clear, but occasional mechanical errors in cohesion prevent the response from achieving a higher band.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.5

The vocabulary used is adequate for the task, attempting some less common words and phrases such as 'drawbacks', 'leading factor', 'surge and fall', and 'favourable'. However, there are noticeable word choice and collocation errors (e.g., 'variety of shop' instead of 'variety of shops', 'air qualitry' misspelling, 'cost of living and crime rate are consider' instead of 'considered'). Spelling errors like 'qualitry' slightly distract the reader, placing this firmly in the Band 6 category.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.5

The writer attempts a mix of simple and complex sentence forms, incorporating clauses and comparative structures. However, grammatical accuracy is inconsistent. There are several noticeable errors involving subject-verb agreement and word forms, such as 'The graph and bar chart illustrates' (should be 'illustrate'), 'noise pollution reduces' (should be 'reduced' given the past tense of the survey), and 'litter observe surge' (should be 'observed a surge'). Punctuation also features irregular spacing before commas and periods. These errors occur frequently enough to impede complete fluency.

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