Write an article for your school website advising students on the best ways to travel around your town or city. You may use information from the sources in ...

This is a Section B directed-writing task worth 40 marks, assessed on content and organisation together with vocabulary, sentence structure and technical accuracy (W1 to W4). You answer one Section B question, not both.

What the task demands

Three things are fixed: the form is an article, the audience is students at your school, and the purpose is advice. All three should be visible on the page. Advice means the reader must be able to do something differently on Monday, which is a higher bar than a general discussion of transport.

Reaching Band 5 (33 to 40)

1. Write to the actual audience. Students have no car, limited money, a fixed start time and heavy bags. Advice that ignores those constraints reads as though it were written for somebody else.
2. Organise by situation, not by mode. The wet morning, the late finish, the journey with equipment. This is more useful than a paragraph each on walking, cycling and the bus, and it produces better cohesion.
3. Use the sources selectively. The point from Source B, that a cyclist learns the geography of their own town, is more interesting advice than any statistic, and the electric bicycle costs from Source E are a genuine caution.
4. Adopt an article's furniture lightly. A headline and a clear opening paragraph are enough. Do not fake bylines, photograph captions or pull quotes at length.
5. Keep the register consistent. Friendly and direct, but not slangy. Band 5 asks for vocabulary precisely adapted to purpose.

What holds a piece in Band 3 (17 to 24)

A list of transport types with advantages and disadvantages, which is a discussion rather than advice. Instructions nobody can follow, such as asking students to buy a bicycle. Repetitive sentence openings. And an ending that simply repeats the introduction.

Technical accuracy

Keep the second person consistent once chosen, and punctuate any list or subheading structure the same way throughout.