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Cambridge IELTS 15 Academic Writing Test 2 places a Task 1 graph before a Task 2 opinion-plus-second-question essay, and the candidates who score band 7 here are the ones who plan both responses before writing either. Task 1 asks you to summarise the number of tourists visiting a particular Caribbean island between 2010 and 2017. Task 2 then turns to a discursive prompt: In the future, nobody will buy printed books or newspapers because they will be able to read everything they want online without paying?
Lead with overall direction (rising, falling, fluctuating) and then group the lines or series by behaviour. Treat this as two body paragraphs answering the two questions in order. Make your opinion explicit in paragraph one and use the second body paragraph to develop the practical or causal answer the second question demands. The introduction must paraphrase both questions; the conclusion must answer both.
Spend twenty minutes flat on Task 1 — five planning, twelve writing, three reviewing — and forty on Task 2, with at least five of those at the end for proofreading. Task 2 is worth twice the marks, so do not let an over-long graph description steal time from your essay. For band 7, the essay's argumentation matters more than the report's elegance, but a clean overview sentence in Task 1 is non-negotiable.
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