Band 6
A real candidate answer at Band 6, with every examiner correction marked on it. 16 corrections.
Band 6 answers communicate clearly. What holds them at 6 rather than 7 is usually consistency: the good sentences are good, and the weak ones are still frequent.
This is the band where progress feels slowest, because the obvious errors are gone and what remains is harder to see without someone pointing at it.
Click any highlighted word to see the correction. The commentary at the foot of the page explains what holds the answer at this band overall.
The task
The chart this describes is noted below.
You should spend about 20 minutes on this task.
The bar chart shows the number of children in two different age groups in an average class in different countries.
Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.
The original chart for this task is not currently shown. The answer below describes the data in full, so the report still reads correctly without it.
The answer
Reproduced exactly as written, errors included.
The bar graph illustrates the number of students an average class at different ages (9 and 13) in .
It is clearly shown in the graph that Hong Kong and Japan had the number of students at the age of 9; Hong Kong had 35 students per class at age 9 while Japan had 31 students per class. However, Japan had an increase to about 24 but the students in Hong Kong dropped 31 students per class at the age 13.
The United States and the had an equal number of 23 students per class at the age of 9 but fell by age 13.
Russia, the lowest number of students both at age 9 and 13, having only 10 and 9 students per class accordingly.
To summarise, at the age of 9 there were but as the students reached the age of 13, studied in Japan.
(176 words)
Examiner comments
The overall verdict, criterion by criterion.
The main information is given, but there are very few sentences that do not contain errors. There are some inappropriate words as well as some incorrect grammar, and this is reducing the overall score. Some of the data is also incorrect to the number of Japanese students aged 13 did not rise to 24, it rose to 34.
However, the paragraphing is clear and logical.
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