Two tasks, ninety minutes, 220–260 words each. Write the answer first, then mark it against the real criteria and read the model. If a criterion will not tick, open the support, take the plan and write the same task again — the second version is where the marks are.
You must answer this question. Write your answer in 220–260 words in an appropriate style. Roughly 45 minutes.
Your class has listened to a radio discussion about how a city can strengthen its cultural life. You have made the notes below.
Ways a city can strengthen its cultural life:
· public libraries
· small live music venues
· free entry to museums
Some opinions expressed in the discussion:
“A library is the only cultural building you can walk into without spending anything or being asked why you came.”
“Small venues are where musicians learn their trade. Take them away and you are left with stadiums and nothing underneath.”
“Free museums are wonderful, but the people who use them were mostly coming anyway.”
Your answer 0 words
Mark your own against the real criteria:
Model answer — 246 words.
Of the three measures proposed, public libraries and small live music venues have the strongest claim on a city's attention, and for the same underlying reason: both are places where something begins.
The case for the library rests less on the books than on the door. It is the only cultural building a person may enter without paying and without explaining why they have come, and that absence of a threshold matters enormously to the people who are hardest to reach. A city that closes its branches does not merely remove a service; it withdraws the one invitation that was never conditional.
Small venues perform an equally quiet function, though a narrower one. They are where musicians are formed, and a scene without them eventually consists of large arenas supplied from elsewhere. While the loss of a two-hundred-seat room is rarely reported, its consequences are cumulative and, once the room has become flats, effectively irreversible.
It is nevertheless the library that I would defend first. A venue serves those who have already decided that music is for them; the library is available to a citizen who has decided nothing at all, and may not know what it is that they are missing. Its reach is therefore wider, and its users are precisely the people no other cultural provision will find.
Free museums are admirable, but they largely serve an audience that was coming in any case. Libraries create the audience in the first place.
The plan.
Every content point must appear.
An opening you can borrow. “Of the three measures proposed, public libraries and small live music venues have the strongest claim on a city's attention, and for the same underlying reason: …” — a first sentence that names the two, joins them, and promises a verdict, all without saying “In this essay”.
Write an answer to one of the questions 2–4 below. Write your answer in 220–260 words in an appropriate style. Put the question number at the top of your answer. Roughly 45 minutes.
2 · Proposal. Your college has been given £5,000 to improve the experience of students who have recently arrived in the country. The principal has asked for proposals. Write a proposal in which you identify the main difficulty such students face, put forward two ways of spending the money, and explain what each of them would achieve.
3 · Review. An English-language student website is running a series called Overrated or Underrated. Write a review of a museum, gallery or historic building you have visited, explaining what visitors are led to expect, what they actually find, and who you would — and would not — recommend it to.
4 · Letter. A newspaper has published an article arguing that learning a foreign language is now a waste of a young person's time, since translation software will shortly do the work for them. Write a letter to the editor responding to the article.
Your answer 0 words
Mark your own against the real criteria:
Model answer to question 2 — the proposal — 249 words.
Introduction
This proposal identifies the principal difficulty faced by students in their first months here and recommends two uses for the sum available. It draws on conversations with fourteen students who arrived within the last year.
The main difficulty
The difficulty is not language and it is not accommodation, both of which the college already handles well. It is that new students have no low-stakes setting in which to be inexpert. Classes are assessed and social events are performed; there is nowhere to be slow, ask an obvious question and be answered without ceremony.
Recommendation 1: a weekly open hour
I would recommend allocating £2,000 to a staffed drop-in hour, held in the same room at the same time each week, with no registration and no purpose beyond answering whatever is asked. The cost is one member of staff and refreshments. This would give arrivals a predictable place to take small problems before they become large ones.
Recommendation 2: paid second-year guides
The remaining £3,000 would be better spent on people than on materials. Fifteen second-year students, paid modestly for two hours a week, would each accompany four newcomers through their first term. Paying them matters: an unpaid scheme depends on goodwill and collapses in week five.
Conclusion
Together these measures would address the difficulty directly rather than around it, and both could be running by the start of next term.
If you chose 3 or 4 instead. The review would replace the headings with a running voice and would spend its third paragraph on the gap between the advertised experience and the real one, closing with two named audiences — one who should go, one who should not. The letter would carry no headings at all, would open by naming the article and the date, would concede the writer's strongest point before answering it, and would end with a claim rather than a summary.
The plan.
Every content point must appear.
An opening you can borrow. Proposal: “This proposal identifies the principal difficulty faced by students in their first months here and recommends two uses for the sum available.” · Review: “Everybody will tell you that the Museum of X is the one thing you must see here. Everybody is half right.” · Letter: “I read your article of 14 March on the futility of language learning with interest and considerable disagreement.”
A writing part counts as done when the length is right and every criterion ticks. That is a harder test than the examiner's, on purpose.
The subscale that moves fastest at C1 is communicative achievement — genre and register — and it moves by rewriting one task three times, not by writing three tasks once. Pick the part that would not tick and do it again on Sunday.