Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 2 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · Cambridge IELTS 21 · 2026-09-26

IELTS Writing Task 2 question

The best way to provide enough homes in large cities is to build tall apartment blocks.

To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement?

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

Student answer (Band 5.5)

Now a days residence is a big problem in large cities. The suitable way to provide sufficient shelters in big cities is to built multistory apartment blocks. I agree that this is the only possible way to solve problem of residence.

Firstly, in large cities there are not adequate homes available for people. Residence is a major problem of big cities where people come from different places of country for work. For example in a big city like karachi people suffer alot, as there is no space for people to live. Cities are now converted into slums. People live in hostel, away from their family because they don't get homes. So there is need to built multi story apartments. Multistory apartments donot require too much land and able to provide shelter to many people as compare to single story apartments.

Secondly, multistorey apartments are cheap and people can affoard them easily. Furthermore, they save land and trees which are very necessary for clean enviroment. Otherwise too much land will be used to accumulate huge number of people, resulting in cutting of trees and natural ecosystem will be destroyed. The enviromental pollution will increase and number of deseases will increase. People will suffer from lot of problems as well as animals. They will be forced to leave the space or their habitat could be destroyed completely.

To conclude, multistory apartments are only possible solution to provide shulter to huge number of people in big cities without consuming too much land and maintaining natiral ecosystem.

AI examiner evaluation

CriterionBand
Task Achievement / Task Response5.5
Coherence and Cohesion5.5
Lexical Resource5.5
Grammatical Range and Accuracy5.0
Overall5.5

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 5.5

The response addresses all parts of the prompt by discussing the extent of agreement regarding tall apartment blocks as a solution for urban housing shortages. The student takes a clear position in the introduction stating agreement and maintains this viewpoint throughout the essay. Main ideas are presented, such as land preservation and affordability, and supported with explanations and examples, notably mentioning Karachi. While some ideas could be extended further and some generalisations are present, the overall task is appropriately covered, fitting a Band 6.0.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 5.5

The essay displays a coherent overall arrangement with a clear introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Paragraphing is utilised adequately to separate distinct ideas, such as housing availability in the first body paragraph and environmental/cost benefits in the second. However, cohesion is at times mechanical or faulty. Transitional markers like 'Firstly' and 'Secondly' are used, but referencing and linking across sentences occasionally lack smooth transitions, leading to repetitive phrasing and a slightly disjointed flow, which aligns well with a Band 6.0 descriptor.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.5

The student uses an adequate range of vocabulary for the task, attempting less common terms such as 'multistory', 'ecosystem', and 'habitat'. However, there are noticeable spelling and word choice errors throughout the text, such as 'Now a days' instead of 'Nowadays', 'built' instead of 'build', 'affoard' instead of 'afford', 'enviroment' instead of 'environment', and 'deseases' instead of 'diseases'. These lexical inaccuracies and spelling mistakes indicate a Band 5.5, as the vocabulary is minimally adequate but errors cause some distraction.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.0

The writing demonstrates a mix of simple and complex sentence forms, attempting relative clauses and conditional-style reasoning. However, there are frequent grammatical errors, particularly missing articles ('solve problem of residence', 'to built multi story apartments'), incorrect verb forms ('are not adequate homes available', 'able to provide shelter'), and punctuation or spacing issues. While these errors do not completely impede communication, they persist across the text, making a Band 5.0 the most accurate descriptor for grammatical range and accuracy.

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

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