Writing Task 1: Process Diagram: Question 4
Syllabus W.task1
The diagram below shows how instant coffee is produced. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features. Write at least 150 words.
The process is linear, running through six stages from the picking of coffee cherries to the packaging of the finished product, with no stage repeated.
Stage 1: Ripe coffee cherries are picked from coffee plants, and the outer fruit is removed to expose the green coffee beans inside. Stage 2: The green beans are dried and then roasted at a high temperature until they turn dark brown and develop their characteristic aroma. Stage 3: The roasted beans are ground into small, uniform particles. Stage 4: The ground coffee is mixed with hot water in large extraction tanks, producing a concentrated coffee liquid, while the used grounds are discarded. Stage 5: The concentrated liquid is sprayed into the top of a tall tower filled with hot air, and the intense heat instantly evaporates the water, leaving behind fine, dry granules of coffee. Stage 6: The dried granules are cooled and then packaged into jars or individual sachets, ready for sale to consumers.
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Worked solution
Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 response
Task Achievement
The overview names the first and last stages and correctly identifies the process as linear before the body reports all six stages accurately and in order, including the technically demanding spray-drying stage, which is explained clearly rather than vaguely, and the response ends with a summary sentence that captures the overall point of the process (turning a solid bean into a soluble powder) without adding an opinion about taste.
Coherence & Cohesion
Sequencing markers (“First”, “then”, “Once roasted”, “After that”, “Next”, “Finally”) give the response a clear chronological structure, while the semicolon in the spray-drying sentence (“…hot air; the intense heat instantly evaporates…”) links cause and effect within a single stage, showing controlled cohesion at sentence level as well as across the whole answer.
Lexical Resource
Technical process vocabulary is used precisely (“green beans”, “extraction tanks”, “spray-drying” implied through description, “granules”) and varied verbs describe each transformation (“picked”, “roasted”, “ground”, “extracted”, “evaporates”), avoiding the vague, repeated verb “made” that weaker responses rely on.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
The passive voice is used accurately throughout for the mechanical stages (“are picked”, “is mixed”, “is sprayed”, “are cooled and then packaged”), and this is combined with a non-defining relative clause (“a process that extracts a concentrated coffee liquid”) and a participle clause (“leaves behind fine, dry granules”) to produce varied, error-free complex sentences.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the most damaging is describing spray-drying as simple boiling, since it misrepresents how the water is actually removed (rapid evaporation in a tower of hot air) and would be marked as a factual inaccuracy under Task Achievement.