Band 5.0 IELTS Writing Task 2 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.0 · Cambridge IELTS 12 · 2026-09-22

IELTS Writing Task 2 question

In many places, new homes are needed, but the only space available for building them is in the countryside. Some people believe it is more important to protect the countryside and not build new homes there.

What is your opinion about this?

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

 

Student answer (Band 5.0)

As human population is increasing the demand for more land is also raising. The shortange of free land in cities have forced them to expand and takeover the land of countryside areas. I think it is a good idea to takeover some land from those areas due to higher cost of living in cities.

There are cities around the world which are flooding with people like Toronto, Mumbai, and Delhi. These places have higher amount of employement opportunities due to which more and more people try to move there. This causes the cost of living to rise in cities, to reduce this cost more homes are required.

Normally, metropoliton cities had build several years ago without addressing the future needs as world have changed it have become expensive to reconstruct buildings and increase the number of appartments. This leads us to the only solution of making homes outside of the cities.

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 4.5

The response only partially addresses the task due to severe under-length. The student attempts to discuss the prompt by stating an opinion that building on countryside land is a good idea to reduce the cost of living in cities. However, the response is restricted to just 151 words, which falls well short of the 250-word minimum requirement. Because of this, the arguments are extremely limited and under-developed, lacking the depth and extended examples expected for a General Training Task 2. While the writer introduces a clear stance in the first paragraph, the lack of sufficient word count and supporting detail prevents a fully developed response.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 5.0

The text shows some basic organisation with an introduction and two body paragraphs, but overall progression is limited due to the brevity of the essay. Cohesive devices are used simply, such as 'There are cities' and 'This causes', but referencing is sometimes imprecise, as seen with the pronoun 'them' in 'forced them to expand', where the antecedent is slightly ambiguous. Paragraphing is attempted, but the paragraphs are underdeveloped and fail to build a cohesive, well-structured argument across the text.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.0

The lexical resource is limited and adequate only for basic communication. The student attempts some less common vocabulary items such as 'metropolitan', 'reconstruct', and 'employment opportunities', but there are noticeable spelling and word-choice errors, including 'shortange' instead of 'shortage', 'raising' instead of 'rising', 'employement', and 'appartments'. Furthermore, the phrase 'flooding with people' is an unnatural collocation. These errors cause some difficulty and prevent the score from reaching higher bands.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.0

The essay displays a mix of simple and complex sentence forms, such as 'As human population is increasing the demand for more land is also raising', which is missing a comma. There are frequent grammatical errors throughout the text, including subject-verb agreement issues like 'metropolitan cities had build several years ago' (instead of 'were built') and tense inconsistencies ('as world have changed it have become expensive'). While meaning is generally recoverable despite these errors, the frequency of inaccuracies places the response firmly in the band 5 range.

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

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