IELTS two-part question band 7 sample: work and career

A two-part question is scored on whether you answered both questions, not on how impressive the sentences sound. Below is a two-part prompt on work and careers, a 282-word answer at band 7 in all four criteria, and the same answer with its second half cut to two sentences — a change that pulls the overall score down a full band while the vocabulary and grammar stay exactly where they were.

The prompt, the band 7 answer, and the weakened version were all written for this article. No official published answer exists for this prompt at this band or any other, and nothing below should be read as one.

What a two-part question actually asks

Task 2 prompts arrive in a handful of shapes: opinion, discussion, problem-solution, and the two-part or direct question. The two-part version gives you a situation and then asks two separate things about it — usually a "why" and a "what should be done", or a "what are the advantages" and a "do you think it is a good development". The official task instructions and general information about the test are on ielts.org. The instruction line under the prompt does not change: give reasons and relevant examples, and write at least 250 words.

The trap is structural, not linguistic. Candidates read the topic, recognise it as familiar, and write the essay they have practised most — usually a reasons essay — then remember the second question near the end and hand it a single sentence. The examiner is not weighing that sentence for style. Task Response asks whether both parts of the question were addressed and whether the ideas in each part were extended, and a part covered in one line has not been extended by any reasonable reading.

This is why the two-part question punishes strong writers who plan badly. Range and accuracy are assessed by three criteria that do not care which question a sentence belongs to. Task Response is the one criterion that counts your answer against the prompt, and it is the one that caps the script when a question goes unanswered.

The prompt and the band 7 answer

Here is the prompt I wrote for this article:

In many countries, workers no longer stay with the same employer for most of their career.

Why do people change employers so frequently, and how should employers respond?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Write at least 250 words.

And the answer. Paragraph word counts are in brackets so you can see how the two questions were shared out.

In many labour markets, spending an entire career with one employer has become rare. This essay will argue that the main reasons are the easier access to job information and the weak financial reward for staying, and that employers should respond by fixing internal progression rather than appealing to loyalty. [50 words]

The first reason is informational. Recruitment platforms and professional networks allow an employee to compare salaries and working conditions across an entire sector within minutes, which was simply not possible a generation ago. The second reason is financial. In most organisations, annual increases for existing staff are modest, while the budget for hiring an outsider is far more generous, so the fastest way to raise your income is to leave. Loyalty, in other words, is quietly punished, and younger workers in particular have noticed this pattern and act on it early in their careers. [94 words]

Employers should therefore respond by treating retention as a design problem rather than a matter of attitude. The most direct measure is to review internal salaries against the external market regularly, so that staff are not forced to resign in order to be paid properly. Beyond pay, companies can create visible routes upward: a technician who knows exactly which skills lead to a supervisor position has a concrete reason to stay. Employers also need to accept that some turnover is healthy, and to concentrate their effort on the specific roles where losing experienced people is genuinely damaging. [97 words]

In conclusion, people move between employers because information about better offers is now easy to obtain and because staying is rarely rewarded financially. Employers who respond by correcting internal pay and clarifying promotion routes will keep the staff they most need. [41 words]

Total: 282 words. Question one gets 94 words of body, question two gets 97. Neither part is the main event.

Why this ielts two part question band 7 sample scores 7 on each criterion

The four criteria below are described in my own words rather than quoted from the published Band Descriptors (updated May 2023), so treat them as a working summary of what each criterion is looking for, not as the wording of the document itself. If you want the criteria laid out at length, start with IELTS Writing band descriptors explained.

Criterion	Score	Why
Task Response	7	Both questions are answered and both answers are extended: two distinct reasons with a mechanism behind each, and three concrete employer measures. The position stated in the introduction holds to the end.
Coherence and Cohesion	7	One clear idea per paragraph, logically sequenced, with referencing ("this pattern", "in other words") doing real work. The signposting is a little mechanical — "The first reason is", "The second reason is".
Lexical Resource	7	Enough flexible, topic-appropriate language to handle the argument precisely: "quietly punished", "a design problem", "a concrete reason". A few choices sit slightly awkwardly, such as "visible routes upward".
Grammatical Range and Accuracy	7	A genuine mix of forms — relative clauses, purpose clauses with "so that", subordination inside long sentences — and errors are rare enough not to slow the reader down.

The arithmetic: 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 = 28, and 28 ÷ 4 = 7.0 for Task 2.

Two things about that sum are worth being precise about, because a lot of people get them backwards. First, criterion scores are whole numbers. There is no such thing as 6.5 for Lexical Resource; half bands appear only when four whole numbers average out to one, as in 7 + 7 + 6 + 6 = 26 ÷ 4 = 6.5. Second, this 7.0 is not the Writing band. The overall Writing score is calculated as (Task 1 + Task 2 × 2) ÷ 3, rounded to the nearest half band, so Task 2 carries twice the weight. A 6.0 on Task 1 with this 7.0 on Task 2 gives (6 + 14) ÷ 3 = 6.67, which rounds to 6.5.

The same answer with a two-sentence second half

Now the version that goes wrong. Everything is identical except the third paragraph, which becomes what most rushed candidates actually write:

Employers should respond by paying their staff better and by giving them more opportunities. If they do this, people will not leave so often. [24 words]

That is 209 words in total, and it breaks in two places at once. It is under the 250-word minimum, which is a problem on its own. And the second of the two required questions has been asserted rather than answered: "pay better" and "give more opportunities" are the question restated as a wish, with no mechanism, no example, and no consequence.

Marked out, the same script now reads:

Criterion	Score	Why
Task Response	5	One of the two questions is addressed in name only, and the script is below the required length. Half the task is missing, which is a Task Response problem before it is anything else.
Coherence and Cohesion	6	The essay still progresses, but the conclusion now announces an answer the body never developed, so the ending does not follow from what precedes it.
Lexical Resource	7	The surviving text is word-for-word the same, so the range on show has not changed. This is the point: strong vocabulary does not rescue an unanswered question.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy	6	Accuracy is unchanged, but the deleted paragraph carried most of the complex structures, and what remains shows a narrower range across the script.

5 + 6 + 7 + 6 = 24, and 24 ÷ 4 = 6.0. A full band lost, entirely on the strength of one paragraph the candidate did not write. Notice that Lexical Resource did not move at all. That is the whole argument of this article in one row of a table: the criteria are not interchangeable, and no amount of range in one compensates for an unanswered question in another. If you want the same comparison at a finer resolution, band 6.5 vs band 7 sets two full scripts side by side.

How the words are distributed, and why the conclusion has two clauses

Here is the distribution in the band 7 version:

Section	Words	Serves
Introduction	50	Both questions, one clause each
Body paragraph 1	94	Question 1
Body paragraph 2	97	Question 2
Conclusion	41	Both questions, one clause each
Total	282	—

Ninety-four against ninety-seven is close to even, and that is deliberate — but there is no official ratio rule, and no examiner counts your words per question. What matters is that each question receives enough text to be developed: a claim, a reason the claim holds, and something concrete attached to it. In practice that lands somewhere near an even split, and a script where one part runs to 130 words and the other to 70 can still be fine if the 70 are dense. A script where the second part is 20 words cannot be, because 20 words is not enough room to develop anything, whatever the ratio says.

The 250-word minimum matters here too. Writing under it costs you, and 282 leaves a working margin without pushing you towards a long, thin essay. The temptation in a two-part question is to write 350 words in which the first question is beautifully developed and the second is an afterthought. Two adequately developed parts beat one excellent part every time, because Task Response asks about the task, not about your best paragraph.

Finally, look at the conclusion. It contains two clauses, and each recovers one of the two questions: why people move, then what employers should do. This is the cheapest fix in the whole task type. If your conclusion only has one clause, you have almost certainly only answered one question — the conclusion is where the imbalance becomes visible to you as the writer, while there is still time to spend two minutes rebalancing.

Checking your own two-part answer

Before you submit, run four checks. Underline the two question words in the prompt and confirm you have a body paragraph for each. Count the words in each of those two paragraphs and see whether one is more than roughly twice the other. Read your conclusion and count its clauses — there should be two. Then, for each body paragraph, confirm it contains a claim, a reason the claim holds, and one concrete instance, because that trio is what "extended" means in practice.

If you want the band 7 threshold explained across all four criteria rather than through a single task type, how to get band 7 in IELTS Writing covers it directly, and a band 7 sample on a technology prompt shows the same standard on an opinion question, where the balance problem does not arise in the same way.

The habit worth building is small: before you write a word, write the two questions at the top of your answer sheet as two short headings, and delete them at the end. It sounds trivial. It is the difference between the 7.0 above and the 6.0 below it.

FAQ

Do I have to answer both parts of the question?

Yes, and it is the thing this task type exists to test. Task Response asks whether both parts were addressed and whether the ideas in each were extended, so a part handled in one sentence has been mentioned rather than answered.

Should both parts get the same number of words?

There is no ratio rule and nobody counts. What matters is that each part carries a claim, a reason and something concrete. That usually lands near an even split — 94 against 97 above — but an uneven split is fine if the shorter half is dense.

Can one criterion be scored 6.5?

No. Each criterion is a whole number, and half bands only appear from the average: 7 + 7 + 6 + 6 = 26 ÷ 4 = 6.5.

Is a Task 2 score of 7.0 the same as a Writing band of 7.0?

No. Writing is (Task 1 + Task 2 × 2) ÷ 3, rounded, so Task 2 counts double. A 6.0 on Task 1 with a 7.0 on Task 2 reports as 6.5.

Where did the essays on this page come from?

Both were written for this article, along with the prompt. There is no official IELTS answer to this question at any band.

Related reading

• IELTS Task 2 band 7 sample answer: technology — the same standard on an opinion prompt
• Band 6.5 vs band 7 essay — two full scripts across the half-band line
• How to get band 7 in IELTS Writing — the four criteria as conditions to meet
• IELTS Writing band descriptors explained — what each criterion is measuring

Task requirements and official test information are on ielts.org.