CD IELTS Prep
All band comparisons

Task 2 · Opinion (agree or disagree) · Transport

Banning cars from city centres

An agree-or-disagree essay on car-free centres, where the band 9 answer recasts the question as one about how scarce urban land is allocated.

The question

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task. Write about the following topic. Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience. Write at least 250 words.

Some people believe that private cars should be banned from the centres of large cities. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

A 250-word discursive essay — the half of the paper that carries two thirds of the marks. This prompt is original, written in the standard format for teaching purposes — it is not taken from any past paper.

What separates the three answers

The 6.5 lists benefits, the 7.5 adds conditions, and the 9 argues that the ban is only ever the last formality in a sequence that has to be run in the right order.

The three answers

Band 6.5

269 words (the task asks for at least 250)

The answer works. It addresses the task, the reader follows it, and the meaning survives — but ideas stay general, linking is mechanical, wording repeats, and small errors are visible throughout.

The answer

In the big cities of the world, the traffic is a very serious problem. Every morning the people spend a long time in the traffic jam and the air is very polluted. For this reason, some people say that the private cars must be banned in the centre of the city. I agree with this opinion, because the benefits are more than the disadvantages.

Firstly, the air quality will improve a lot. The cars produce a lot of the pollution which cause the asthma4 and the other diseases, especially for the children and the old people. If we remove the cars from the centre, the people can breathe the clean air, and also the noise will be less. This is very good for the health.

Secondly, the centre will become more beautiful and more safe3. Now the streets are full of the cars and there is no space for the people. If the cars are banned, the government can build more parks, more bicycle lanes and more cafes in the street. The tourists will come more and the shops will earn more money. In many European cities they did this and it was successful.2

On the other hand, some people will have the difficulty, for example the old people, the disabled people and the shopkeepers who need to bring their products. But I think the government can give them the special permission.1

In conclusion, I strongly agree that the private cars should not enter in the city centre, because the city will be cleaner, safer and more beautiful for everybody, but the government must first improve the public transport.

What an examiner notices

  1. 1. Task response

    “But I think the government can give them the special permission.”

    Disabled residents, older people and delivery businesses are the hardest part of this policy, and the answer to all three is one clause. This is where a band 7 essay would spend a paragraph.

  2. 2. Task response

    “In many European cities they did this and it was successful.”

    An example with nothing in it — no city, no measure of success, no mechanism. Vague appeals to elsewhere are among the commonest reasons a Task 2 essay stalls at 6.

  3. 3. Lexical resource

    “the centre will become more beautiful and more safe”

    Safe takes the inflected comparative, and beautiful is doing work that attractive or pleasant would do better. Both signal a vocabulary stretched to its limit.

  4. 4. Grammatical range and accuracy

    “The cars produce a lot of the pollution which cause the asthma”

    Agreement fails in the relative clause, and the article before pollution and asthma is not wanted. Three errors in one clause, none of which stops the reader.

One honest caveat

Band labels here describe what each piece of writing demonstrates against the four published assessment areas, paraphrased in plain language. They are teaching illustrations produced for this site, not official material, and no sample has been marked by a test provider. Real scripts are marked whole; two answers with the same label can still look quite different from each other, and nothing on this page can promise anyone a particular result.

Compare another question