Band 6.5 IELTS Writing Task 2 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 6.5 · Cambridge IELTS 15 · 2026-10-05

IELTS Writing Task 2 question

Some people say that advertising is extremely successful at persuading us to buy things. Other people think that advertising is so common that we no longer pay attention to it. Discuss both views and give your own opinion.

Student answer (Band 6.5)

These days, you cannot open Instagram or YouTube for ten seconds without an ads screaming in your face. While many people believe ads is super successful at making us buy things we often do not even need, others argue that there are just too many ads now, so we simply ignore them. In my view, even though we try our best to avoid ads, they still win and trick us into spending money and buy subsricption.

On the one hand, advertising is clever because it sells dreams, not just items. Companies use famous actors or athletes to make ordinary products look special. For example, if a handsome movie star sprays a body perfume and ten girls start running behind him in the commercial, teenage boys actually believe this magic might happen to them too and go buy it.

On the other hand, people today are completely exhausted by the endless flood of promotions. Internet users have developed supersonic reflexes just to click the "Skip Ad" button the very millisecond it appears. Most of us mute the TV during commercial breaks or scroll past sponsored posts without reading a single word. Because companies push their products everywhere from elevator screens to toilet walls, people have simply learned to tune them out like annoying background buzzing.

In my opinion, despite our best efforts to ignore them, advertising still quietly works on our brain. We might laugh at a ridiculous shampoo commercial and skip it, but when we are standing in the supermarket staring at twenty identical bottles, our hand naturally reaches for that exact same brand.

To conclude, while having ads thrown at us all day has made people tired and quick to skip them, creative marketing still controls our choices much more than we like to admit.

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 6.5

Your response addresses all parts of the task by discussing both views—that advertising is extremely successful and that it is too common to be noticed—while also clearly stating your own position. You present relevant ideas, such as the psychological impact of celebrity endorsements and the automatic behavior of skipping ads on the internet. However, some ideas show a tendency to be slightly under-developed or supported by simple generalisations rather than deeper extension, which keeps the response at this level. To reach a higher standard, you could expand more fully on the mechanisms of consumer psychology or provide more elaborated examples of how corporate marketing strategies adapt to avoidance behaviours.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 7.0

Your essay demonstrates a clear logical organisation and progression throughout. You make effective use of paragraphing, separating the introduction, two body paragraphs representing opposing views, your personal opinion, and the conclusion cleanly. Cohesive devices such as 'On the one hand' and 'On the other hand' are employed to guide the reader through your arguments. Referencing is generally clear, and information flows well. To move further up, you could ensure that cohesive devices are used even more flexibly and unobtrusively, avoiding slightly formulaic transition markers and enhancing the seamless integration of ideas between paragraphs.

Lexical Resource: Band 6.5

You display an adequate range of vocabulary for the task, attempting some less common and descriptive phrases such as 'supersonic reflexes', 'endless flood of promotions', and 'background buzzing'. However, there are some minor word choice and form inaccuracies, such as 'an ads screaming' instead of 'an ad screaming' and 'buy subsricption' instead of 'buying subscriptions', alongside a spelling slip. These do not impede communication, but they highlight the occasional slip that prevents the score from rising. To improve, focus on precise collocations and ensuring word forms precisely match their grammatical function in the sentence.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 6.5

Your writing features a good mix of simple and complex sentence forms, demonstrating control over relative clauses and conditional-like constructions, such as 'if a handsome movie star sprays a body perfume... teenage boys actually believe this magic might happen'. There are some grammatical errors, such as subject-verb agreement issues ('ads is super successful') and minor preposition or article slips, but these errors rarely impede communication and do not obscure your meaning. For a higher band, you would need to produce a greater frequency of error-free sentences using a wider variety of advanced grammatical structures with consistent accuracy.

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

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