Writing Task 1: Process Diagram: Question 5
Syllabus W.task1
The diagram below shows the life cycle of a salmon. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features. Write at least 150 words.
The process is cyclical rather than linear: it consists of five stages, and the final stage leads directly back to the first, so the cycle repeats indefinitely.
Stage 1: Adult salmon swim from the ocean upstream into a freshwater river to spawn, and the females lay their eggs in shallow gravel nests known as redds. Stage 2: The fertilised eggs hatch into tiny larvae called alevins, which remain hidden in the gravel and feed on the yolk sac still attached to their bodies. Stage 3: Once the yolk sac has been fully absorbed, the alevins emerge from the gravel as young fry and begin feeding independently on small aquatic insects. Stage 4: As the fry mature into juvenile salmon, known first as parr and then as smolts, they migrate downstream towards the sea, undergoing physical changes that allow them to survive in salt water. Stage 5: The smolts enter the ocean, where they spend one to several years feeding and growing into adults, before returning to the same river in which they hatched in order to spawn, at which point the cycle begins again.
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Worked solution
Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 response
Task Achievement
The overview explicitly identifies the process as cyclical rather than linear and states the number of stages, which is essential for this task type, and the body then reports all five stages in the correct biological order, including the easily-omitted return migration in Stage 5, closing with a sentence that reinforces the cyclical nature of the process rather than treating it as if it simply ended.
Coherence & Cohesion
The response is structured around a clear chronological chain (“begins when”, “then”, “Once”, “After that”, “Finally”, “at this point”) and the final paragraph explicitly contrasts this process with a linear one (“unlike most manufacturing processes”), which strengthens overall coherence by returning to the cyclical theme introduced in the overview.
Lexical Resource
Accurate biological terminology is used throughout (“redds”, “alevins”, “fry”, “parr”, “smolts”) together with precise verbs of change (“hatch”, “emerge”, “mature”, “migrate”), showing the wide, topic-specific vocabulary needed for a band 9 response rather than generic words like “baby salmon” or “grow up”.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
A mix of passive forms (“their eggs in gravel nests known as redds”, “the yolk sac has been absorbed”) and accurate active verbs where salmon are the natural agents of their own movement (“migrate downstream”, “swim…upstream”) is used appropriately, since a biological life cycle, unlike a factory process, does involve a living agent; this is combined with a semicolon-linked clause and a participle clause (“thereby restarting the same five stages”) to add controlled grammatical range.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the most damaging is stopping the description after the salmon enter the ocean and never reporting the return migration, since omitting it removes the very feature, the cycle closing on itself, that this task type is designed to test.