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BAND NINE SAMPLE ESSAYS

If you’re preparing for the IELTS exam, you should be paying attention to band nine sample essays. These can be a valuable resource in multiple ways. You can:

  • Look at how the essays answer the structure.
  • Explore the structure of the essays.
  • Take the best of the vocabulary and use it yourself.
  • Find useful grammar structures.

If you’re looking for model answers, you’re in the right place. On this page, you can find a list of model answers written by an experienced IELTS tutor which are packed with the best practices in vocabulary, grammar and essay structure.

Why you should trust these essays

While it’s important to look for band nine IELTS essays, it’s not always easy to find them. Anyone can write an essay, post it to a website and call it a band nine essay sample. As a result, some students end up copying fairly poor examples of IELTS writing. That’s why I put together this page of essays. All of these were written by me, an experienced teacher with a Master’s degree from Oxford University and years of experience with IELTS writing.

If you’d prefer to have these essays in book format, you can. Check out the download page here.

Types of IELTS essay

There are five broad types of essays in task two of the IELTS writing exam. These are:

  • Agree or disagree: Asks you for your opinion on an issue.
  • Both sides and an opinion: Asks you to look at both sides of something and explain what you think about the issue.
  • Problem and solution: Asks you to explain one or more problems with something and some solutions.
  • Two-part question: Asks you two questions.
  • Advantages and disadvantages: Asks you to examine the advantages and disadvantages of something without giving your opinion.

The essays on this page are organised by these five types. I’ve also included all of our task one essays at the start of the list.

Task one essays

Task one essays are quite different in format and execution to task two essays. For task one, you have to explain a diagram of some kind. You have a fewer words and the structure is quite different. You can learn more about these essays in our task one guide. All of our task one essays are collected below.

Agree or Disagree Essays

This type of essay simply asks for your opinion on an issue. The best way to approach these is to give two specific reasons for one point of view. These usually ask you ‘What is your opinion?’ or ‘To what extent do you agree or disagree?’.

Both sides and an opinion essays

Both sides and an opinion essays will ask you to compare both sides of an issue as well as give your point of view. Unlike an agree or disagree essay, you should make sure you cover both sides. Typically these will ask you to ‘compare the advantages and disadvantages and disadvantages and give your opinion’ or ‘compare both sides and give your opinion’.

Problem and solution essays

A problem and solution essay will require you to explore the issues caused by something and some ways of fixing those problems. It’s usually best to dedicate two paragraphs to two specific problems and then briefly mention some solution in the conclusion. These questions will almost always contain the words ‘problem’ and ‘solution’, so they should be easy to find.

Two-part question essays

Two-part IELTS questions ask you to answer two questions. This can be a bit intimidating, but actually just requires you to dedicate one body paragraph to each issue. There aren’t any specific phrases that you can use to identify this question type, but it will always be obvious that there are two questions.

Advantages and disadvantages essays

These questions only ask you to look at the advantages and disadvantages of something. This makes them easy to confuse with questions that ask you to compare both sides and give your opinion. The structure of these is simple when you know how to identify them. The key thing is to not get them confused with another essay type.