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Task 1 Academic · Process diagram · Environment

How glass bottles are recycled

A ten-stage recycling process, and a lesson in why a process answer is scored on grouping and passive voice rather than on retelling the arrows.

The question

You should spend about 20 minutes on this task. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.

The diagram below shows the process by which used glass bottles are recycled.

Stages shown in the diagram
  1. 1Households place used glass bottles in collection banks or kerbside boxes.
  2. 2Collection lorries transport the mixed glass to a processing plant.
  3. 3The glass is tipped onto a conveyor belt.
  4. 4Magnets lift out metal caps and rings.
  5. 5Hand-pickers and optical scanners remove ceramics, stones and other contaminants.
  6. 6The clean glass is sorted by colour into clear, green and brown streams.
  7. 7Each stream is crushed into small fragments known as cullet.
  8. 8The cullet is mixed with sand, soda ash and limestone.
  9. 9The mixture is melted in a furnace at approximately 1,500°C, then poured into moulds and blown into new bottles.
  10. 10The finished bottles are cooled, inspected, filled and delivered to shops, where the cycle begins again.

A 150-word factual summary of a graph, chart, table, process or map. 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

Only two of the three answers notice that the diagram is a loop; the one that does not simply narrates ten arrows in order and never says what the process is for.

The three answers

Band 6.5

175 words (the task asks for at least 150)

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

The picture shows us the process of the recycling of the glass bottles, from the houses to the shops.

At the first step, people put their used glass bottles in the collection banks or in the boxes outside their houses. After that, the lorries collect all the glass and take it to a processing plant. After that, the workers put the glass on a conveyor and the magnets take out the metal caps and rings.

After that, the workers and the machines with optical scanners remove the ceramics and the stones.2 Then the glass is sorted by the colour, which are clear, green and brown, and a machine crush every colour into the small pieces which is called cullet3.

Then the factory mix the cullet with sand, soda ash and limestone and melt it in a furnace in 1,500 degrees.4 After that they pour the melted glass into the moulds and blow it to make new bottles. Finally the new bottles are cooled and checked, and then they are filled and sent to the shops.1

What an examiner notices

  1. 1. Task achievement

    “Finally the new bottles are cooled and checked, and then they are filled and sent to the shops.”

    The answer ends exactly where the diagram loops back to its beginning, and never says so. Identifying the process as cyclical is the overview this answer does not have.

  2. 2. Coherence and cohesion

    “After that, the workers and the machines with optical scanners remove the ceramics and the stones.”

    The fourth consecutive sentence opened with 'After that'. Sequence is being marked, but nothing else is — the reader is not told that these stages together form a cleaning phase.

  3. 3. Grammatical range and accuracy

    “a machine crush every colour into the small pieces which is called cullet”

    Two agreement failures in nine words, plus an unnecessary article. None of it blocks meaning, which is precisely why the answer sits here rather than lower.

  4. 4. Grammatical range and accuracy

    “Then the factory mix the cullet with sand, soda ash and limestone and melt it in a furnace in 1,500 degrees.”

    An active construction that has to invent 'the factory' as an agent, where 'is mixed' and 'is melted' would need none — and 'in 1,500 degrees' should be 'at'.

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.

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