General Training Task 1 Band 7 sample answer 1

The answer below has been rated based on the public IELTS descriptors. Click the word or words in red to see the correction, and scroll to the bottom of the page to read our comments on the letter.

You should spend about 20 minutes on this task.

You are a member of your college/university library and have recently received an email from them asking you to return overdue books that you had actually never borrowed.

Write a letter to the librarian. In your letter:

• explain the situation
• say what you would like them to do
• ask if this problem will affect your library membership

Write at least 150 words.

You do NOT need to write any addresses.

Begin your letter as follows:

Dear………………………

Dear Ms Librarian the letter can start with a job title or a name, but not a combination of both – ‘Dear Ms Smith’ or ‘Dear Manager’,

I am writing this letter to you in reply to the E-mail, no need for a comma here which I was sent on Sunday, regarding the overdue books which I had to return.

I am afraid to inform you that I have no such book of yours as I was not ‘have not been’ in the country in the past week. Even though I was out of the country to avoid repetition, this could be ‘overseas’, I did check ‘have checked’ my bookshelf for any library book ‘books’ and I found none within ‘in’ my possession.

I think you have ‘may have’ – it’s less confrontational and therefore more polite made a mistake in your readings, or the records of the books checked in and out have gone wrong, two sentences cannot be joined with a comma – this could be a new sentence or a semi colon ( ; ) is needed please check your computer once more and see if there is any misunderstanding.

Lastly, I just want to ask you about my membership, that if delete this and add ‘whether’ this incident has ‘will have’ any affect on my membership.

Once again I’m telling you that you have made a misunderstanding and I don’t have your books this is too aggressive and would not be considered polite.

Yours Faithfully,

Maria Benson

(154 words)

Comments:

The word count is good (154 words) and the writer has addressed each part of the question (although be careful of using too much vocabulary from the question). Also, some parts of your answer do not really flow logically – the writer states she was ‘out of the country in the last week’, but this needs to be tied in with the question – e.g. ‘I was out of the country on the day the books were borrowed’.

Commonly a letter would start by addressing a person by name or by position, but not job title. Fore example ‘Dear Manager’ would be acceptable, but not ‘Dear Ms Librarian’.

Grammatically, the writer could also have used the passive a little more often. For example, in the third paragraph, the sentence could have been written as ‘I think a mistake may have been made’