Employment by Sector Table: Band 6 Sample Answer

The report covers all four sectors and the figures are reported accurately. An overview is present, but it is weak: "there were many changes in the employment" does not say what those changes were, and the clear overall picture — a shift of workers out of agriculture and manufacturing into services, with construction unchanged — only appears at the very end, in a final sentence that repeats the body rather than summarising it. The writer also adds irrelevant speculation ("This is probably because many farmers moved to the cities"), which Task 1 does not ask for because the table gives no reasons. The comparisons between sectors are limited, so the key features are adequately but not clearly highlighted — Band 6.

The information is arranged coherently and there is a clear overall progression through the four sectors. The linking, however, is mechanical: the body paragraphs are organised as "Firstly", "Secondly", "Thirdly", "Finally", so the report reads as a list of separate sectors instead of grouping the falling sectors together and contrasting them with services. Paragraphing is not always logical — agriculture and manufacturing share a paragraph but services has its own, and the construction paragraph is a single sentence. This is Band 6 cohesion.

The vocabulary is adequate, and there are some accurate data expressions such as "accounted for", "fell steadily", "reached a peak of" and "remained stable". There is noticeable repetition ("decreased … decreased again", "went down", "went up"), and some informal or imprecise choices: "increased a lot" and "the most popular sector" (popular is not the right word for employment — the largest employer). There is one spelling/word-form error, "rised" (rose). These errors do not impede communication, so Lexical Resource is Band 6.

There is a mix of simple and complex sentences, including a contrast with "but" and a relative clause ("which means that…"), though most sentences follow the same simple pattern. Errors are noticeable: agreement in "The table show" and "two thirds of workers was working", "the services was" (article plus agreement), an unnecessary article in "the employment", and a comma splice in "construction was 10% in all three years, it remained stable". These errors rarely reduce communication, which fits Band 6.