Cambridge IELTS Writing Task 1: Using the Practice Books So the Questions Are Not Wasted

A Cambridge IELTS book gives you four complete tests, which means four Academic Task 1 questions in the correct shape and at the correct difficulty. It does not give you a mark for the answer you write. That second half is the half that moves a band, and it is the half most candidates skip.

This post says what is actually inside those books, which Task 1 question shapes keep coming back, how to sit one properly in 20 minutes, and how to mark the answer afterwards. It ends with one weak overview sentence rewritten in three steps, with the descriptor each change serves named.

Bandly is not connected to Cambridge University Press or to the organisations that run the IELTS test. This is a guide to using material you already own.

What is actually in the book

Every numbered volume in the series follows the same plan. Four tests, then the audio scripts, then answer keys for Listening and Reading, then a section of sample Writing answers, then blank answer sheets.

Read that list again and notice the asymmetry. Listening and Reading have answer keys, so you can mark them yourself in five minutes and get a number. Writing has no key, because there is no single correct answer. What you get instead is a sample Writing answer for each task, sometimes with a short comment attached.

So the book hands you three things for Task 1:

• The question, in the real shape, with the real wording and the real instruction to write at least 150 words.
• A sample answer, which shows you what a response at a given level looks like.
• Nothing at all about your own answer.

That third line is the whole problem. A candidate who works through four tests from one volume has written four Task 1 answers that nobody has read, and reading the printed sample afterwards feels like feedback without being feedback. You cannot see your own errors by looking at someone else's correct sentences.

Older volumes put General Training Reading and Writing sections inside the same book; newer ones are sold as separate Academic and General Training editions. Check which one is in front of you before you start, because the two versions of Task 1 are completely different questions. Academic Task 1 is a report on a visual. General Training Task 1 is a letter, and the first decision there is register, which the General Training Task 1 guide covers. If you are not sure which test you are sitting, what changes between Academic and General Training sets the two side by side.

The question shapes that keep coming back

The volume number on the cover is not a useful unit of practice. The question shape is. Across the series the same small set of Academic Task 1 visuals appears again and again, and each shape asks you to group the data differently.

Two visuals in one question is also common, a bar chart beside a pie chart for example. The instruction is still one report, not two, and the overview has to cover both.

Once you see the shapes, a book stops being four tests and becomes four chances to practise whichever shape you are weakest at. If three of your four questions are line graphs, borrow a table question from somewhere else rather than writing three line graph reports.

Worked answers for each of these shapes, each one with a band estimate and the reasoning behind every criterion, are in the Academic Task 1 sample library. The line graph samples are the closest thing to the most common question in the books.

Sitting one properly

Twenty minutes, at least 150 words, nothing else open. These conditions are not optional extras; a Task 1 answer written with a dictionary and no clock measures nothing.

• One timer, 20 minutes, started before you read the question. Reading time is part of the 20 minutes in the real test.
• No dictionary, no grammar checker, no searching the topic. One lookup and the answer is no longer a measurement.
• Write the way you will write on the day. By hand on lined paper for the paper test, typed with spellcheck off for the computer test.
• Count your words by hand at the end. Count three lines, take the average, multiply by the number of lines. You need to know your own figure before the exam.
• Keep the paper. You are going to mark it, and you will want to mark it again in a month.

Write the overview before you write the detail paragraphs, not after. It is the sentence the descriptors name directly, and candidates who leave it for last are the ones who run out of time and never write it.

The step the book cannot do: marking your own answer

Task 1 is marked on four criteria of equal weight: Task Achievement, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Mark your answer against them one at a time, in four passes. One read with a general feeling about the quality tells you nothing you can act on.

Pass one, Task Achievement. Find your overview. Is there a sentence that states the largest pattern without any individual figures in it? The public band descriptors put an answer that "recounts detail mechanically with no clear overview" at band 5, and ask for "a clear overview of main trends, differences or stages" at band 7. If that sentence is missing, nothing in the other three criteria can repair it. What an overview is and where it goes has the mechanism in full, and choosing which features to report covers the selection half.

Pass two, Coherence and Cohesion. Does the report have a shape: introduction, overview, then two detail paragraphs that each hold one group? Count your linking words. More is not better; mechanical linking is named at band 6.

Pass three, Lexical Resource. Underline every word you used to describe a change. If "increased" appears four times, that is a range problem, not an accuracy problem, and the two sit in different parts of the criterion.

Pass four, Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Count your sentences, then count how many are a single clause. A report built entirely from simple sentences cannot reach the higher bands however few errors it contains.

A fuller version of this routine, with what to write in the margin at each pass, is in how to mark your own IELTS essay.

One overview sentence, rewritten in three steps

Here is the kind of opening that comes out of a first timed attempt. It is not a disaster; it is ordinary, and it is where most candidates actually are.

The graph shows the number of visitors to a museum. In 1990 the number was 2 million and in 1995 it was 3 million and in 2000 it was 5 million.

Step one, add the missing sentence. The paragraph above has an introduction and then detail. There is no statement of the overall pattern, so the band 5 wording quoted earlier describes it exactly. Add this:

Overall, visitor numbers rose across the whole period, and the sharpest rise came in the second half.

That one sentence is a Task Achievement change. It is the difference between an answer the descriptors call mechanical and an answer that has cleared the overview requirement.

Step two, take the figures out of the overview and put them in the body. An overview with numbers in it is a detail sentence wearing a hat. Keeping "2 million" out of that sentence and moving it to the body paragraph is a second Task Achievement change, this time about selection: the overview carries the pattern, the body carries the evidence.

Step three, vary the verbs and join the clauses properly. The original says "the number was" three times, joined by "and" twice. Rewritten:

Visitor numbers climbed from 2 million in 1990 to 3 million in 1995, before rising more steeply to 5 million by the end of the period.

Two changes are happening in that sentence and they serve different criteria. Replacing three uses of "was" with "climbed" and "rising more steeply" is Lexical Resource, specifically the range half of it. Replacing two clauses joined by "and" with one sentence carrying a prepositional phrase and a "before" clause is Grammatical Range and Accuracy.

Three steps, four criteria touched, and not one new impressive word learned. That is what the printed sample answer at the back of the book is doing, and seeing which criterion each move serves is the thing the book does not tell you. The introduction sentence post does the same exercise on the first line instead of the overview.

How to read the printed sample answer without copying it

Read it once for shape and once for language, and never read it before you write.

For shape, mark the sample in the margin: where is the overview, how many detail paragraphs, what is grouped in each. You are looking for decisions, not sentences.

For language, pick at most three phrases that you could honestly use in a different question about different data. A phrase you can only use for museum visitors in the 1990s is not worth memorising, and memorised sentences that do not fit the question in front of you are visible to a marker.

What you must not do is treat the printed answer as a target to imitate line by line. It was written for that question. Your next question will have a different shape, and a report assembled out of remembered phrases reads as exactly that.

A four week routine with one volume

One Cambridge volume holds four Academic Task 1 questions. Here is how to make them last a month.

1. Week one. Sit Test 1 Task 1 under timed conditions. Mark it in four passes. Rewrite only the overview.
2. Week two. Sit Test 2 Task 1. Mark it. Compare the Task Achievement note with last week's: if the overview is still the problem, do not move on to vocabulary.
3. Week three. Sit Test 3 Task 1. Mark it. This week rewrite one body paragraph in full, grouping the data differently from the way you first grouped it.
4. Week four. Sit Test 4 Task 1, then rewrite Test 1 from scratch without looking at what you wrote in week one. The gap between those two answers is your actual progress, and it is the only measurement in this routine that is not self reported.

Four questions, four marked answers, one repeat. That is more useful than working through three volumes and marking nothing.

Do this today

Open whichever volume you have, find the Academic Task 1 question in Test 1, and give it 20 minutes with the clock running and nothing else open. Then do the four marking passes on paper before you look at the sample answer at the back.

If you want a second opinion on the answer you just wrote, you can paste it into Bandly and get a band estimate for each of the four criteria with the sentences that drove each one. Those numbers are estimates produced by a scoring engine, not marks from a qualified examiner, so treat them as a way to find the criterion holding you back rather than as a result.