Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 2 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · Cambridge IELTS 12 · 2026-10-02

IELTS Writing Task 2 question

Today more and more tourists are visiting places where conditions are difficult, such as the Sahara desert or the Antarctic.

What are the benefits and disadvantages for tourists who visit such places?

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

 

Student answer (Band 5.5)

It have been observed that people are becoming more adventurous from recent years, Most of the population is going to the places with harsh weather condition. There are myriad of merits and demerits of visiting such places. I will discuss both the aspects with relevant reasoning in upcoming paragraphs.

Examinng the brighter side,the foremost reason, younger generation is interested in exploring new places because they can generate income out of it . People watch videos related to the place that are difficult to reach and plans to visit there to shows in on social media for views and money. For examples, there are majority of people that post videos of travelling to dangerous places in the world by risking their lives to engage audiance to their channels. It also helps them to earn a massive amount of money by showing there struggle and hardship on instragram and youtube.

On contrary, there are some darker side of it, by visiting places like Antarctic , people are disturbing the environment. If every other person start touring the natural habitates, it will clearly make horrible effect on the climate change. For instance, in past large mass of people visited hill- station like manali and shimla, because of the large population the climate change happend and cause floods and cloud burst situation and cause deathes of human beings.

In conclusion, I believe that there are both positive and negative effect of visting natural places. I feel there should be some safety

measurements or ristrictions in the number of visitors per year implimented by local government to make it such places safe.

AI examiner evaluation

CriterionBand
Task Achievement / Task Response5.5
Coherence and Cohesion6.0
Lexical Resource5.5
Grammatical Range and Accuracy5.0
Overall5.5

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 5.5

The response addresses all parts of the task by discussing both the benefits and disadvantages of visiting difficult tourist destinations, fulfilling the basic requirements of the prompt. However, the ideas remain somewhat limited and under-developed. For example, the benefit regarding financial gain on social media is introduced, but the explanation stays superficial rather than fully exploring the psychological or economic drivers. Similarly, the environmental disadvantage mentions crowding in hill stations like Manali and Shimla, which slightly digresses from the specific context of extreme locations like the Sahara or the Antarctic. The position is generally clear, but a greater depth of reasoning and more relevant examples specific to extreme environments would be needed to fully satisfy higher criteria.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 6.0

The essay demonstrates a coherent overall arrangement with clear paragraphing, dividing the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion appropriately. There is a logical progression from discussing the benefits to the disadvantages, and finally to the conclusion. However, cohesion within and between sentences is sometimes mechanical or faulty. Devices such as 'Examinng the brighter side' and 'On contrary' are used, but referencing is not always clear, and the transitional phrases feel slightly formulaic. While the paragraphing is sufficient, the mechanical nature of the cohesive devices prevents the flow from feeling entirely natural throughout.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.5

The vocabulary used is adequate for the task, successfully conveying the basic points about tourism in harsh conditions. The writer attempts some less common vocabulary, such as 'adventurous', 'myriad of merits', and 'habitats', but these attempts are occasionally accompanied by word-choice, word-form, or spelling inaccuracies like 'instragram', 'audiance', 'habitates', and 'implimented'. While these errors do not severely impede communication, they reflect a limited range and noticeable slips that prevent the lexical resource from achieving greater precision and fluency.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.0

The writing relies on a mix of simple and complex sentence forms, but the attempts at complex structures are often faulty. There are frequent errors in grammar and punctuation that can cause difficulty for the reader, including subject-verb agreement issues like 'It have been observed' and 'cause deathes', missing articles such as 'in past', and errors in prepositions and punctuation, including a comma splice in 'Examinng the brighter side,the foremost reason'. These frequent grammatical errors show limited control over complex sentence patterns and demonstrate the need for greater accuracy across basic structures.

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