Band 6.0 IELTS Writing Task 2 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 6.0 · Cambridge IELTS 16 · 2026-09-30

IELTS Writing Task 2 question

Some people spend most of their lives living close to where they were born.

What might be the reasons for this?

What are the advantages and disadvantages?

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

 

Student answer (Band 6.0)

Most people never move far from their place of birth. The reason will be discussed in this essay, with the advantages and disadvantages.

One of the major reasons people spend their lives living close to home is family and emotional attachment. people often have close relationship with parents, childhood friends and extended families who provide support and comfort. For example, in nigeria, people stay close to home because of childcare and financial emergencies. Similarly, they believe staying close to their homes is less risky, they are sure s of what to expect and will not be disappointed. Because the are familiar with the area, there won't be any form of language barrier or unexpected problem.

Staying in a familiar area comes with clear advantages. Firstly, strong support system from the family. For instance, a nursing mother can leave her child to the care of family members when she want to run an errand. In addition, family can help financially in emergency situations. Furthermore, living close to one's birth place can bring sense of belonging because everybody knows you and it will be less stressful ralating to the system of the area.

On the other hand , living close to ones birth home can limit opportunities. Most people focuses only on the comfort that comes with living in a familiar area, they forget that it can hinder their growth, both in career and knowledge. They stay on one job for a very long time without exploring other opportunities and trying new things such as new culture and cusine which will help broaden their knowledge and teach them adaptabilty. Similarly, these people can become over dependent on their relatives.

In conclusion, comfort and safety are major reason people prefer to live close to where they were born. While it allows strong support from relatives, it also limits people from growing in their career.

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 6.5

Your response addresses all parts of the prompt by discussing the reasons people stay near their birthplace, alongside the advantages and disadvantages. Your position is clear throughout the essay. For instance, you effectively point out emotional attachment and familiarity as key drivers, while noting that strong support systems act as an advantage, and limited growth serves as a drawback. To reach a higher level, your ideas could be extended and supported more deeply rather than relying on brief explanations. For example, when you mention that living close limits career growth, developing a specific scenario or a more detailed example would strengthen your arguments and provide a more fully elaborated discussion.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 6.5

Your essay has a coherent overall arrangement and a clear structure with distinct paragraphs for each prompt requirement. You successfully use basic cohesive devices and markers such as 'Firstly', 'In addition', and 'On the other hand' to guide the reader through your arguments. However, cohesion occasionally feels a bit mechanical or repetitive. To improve, you could use a wider variety of transitional phrases and ensure that referencing is smoother throughout. For instance, sentences like 'Most people focuses only on the comfort...' could be linked more fluidly to the preceding or following ideas to create a more seamless progression of thought from sentence to sentence.

Lexical Resource: Band 6.0

You demonstrate an adequate range of vocabulary for the task, successfully using functional terms such as 'emotional attachment', 'financial emergencies', and 'adaptability'. You also attempt some less common vocabulary items. However, there are noticeable word-choice and mechanical errors, such as capitalization issues ('people' instead of 'People', 'nigeria' instead of 'Nigeria'), spelling mistakes ('cusine' instead of 'cuisine'), and awkward phrasing like 'ralating to the system'. To achieve a higher band, you need to use a wider range of precise lexical items with fewer errors in word choice, spelling, and word formation, ensuring your vocabulary is both accurate and appropriate for an academic or formal context.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.5

You make use of a mix of simple and complex sentence forms, demonstrating that you can construct multi-clause sentences such as 'While it allows strong support from relatives, it also limits people from growing in their career.' However, your writing contains frequent grammatical errors, particularly regarding subject-verb agreement (e.g., 'Most people focuses' instead of 'focuses', 'Because the are familiar' instead of 'they are'), missing articles, and punctuation errors. To move to a higher band, you need to demonstrate better control over complex sentence structures and significantly reduce the frequency of basic grammatical slips, ensuring that your sentences are consistently accurate.

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

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