Writing Task 1: Process Diagram: Question 10
Syllabus W.task1
The diagram below shows the life cycle of a honey bee. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.
The process is cyclical, returning to its starting point once the final stage is complete, and consists of four sequential stages:
- Egg: the queen bee lays a single egg inside a cell of the honeycomb.
- Larva: after around three days, the egg hatches into a larva, which is fed intensively by worker bees and grows rapidly, moulting its skin several times as it increases in size.
- Pupa: once the larva has reached its full size, worker bees seal the cell with a wax capping; inside the sealed cell, the larva spins a cocoon and enters the pupal stage, during which its body is gradually transformed into the form of an adult bee.
- Adult: roughly two weeks after the cell was capped, the fully developed adult chews its way out of the cell and emerges into the hive; depending on how it was reared, it becomes either a worker, a drone, or, occasionally, a new queen, and if it is a queen, she will eventually mate and begin laying eggs of her own, returning the cycle to its starting stage.
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Worked solution
Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 response
Task Achievement
The overview correctly identifies both the number of stages and the fact that the process is cyclical rather than linear, and each of the four stages (egg, larva, pupa and adult) is described accurately, in the correct order, with the final sentence explicitly closing the cycle back to egg-laying.
Coherence & Cohesion
The four stages are organised into three paragraphs (overview; egg to pupa; adult and cycle closure), and cohesion is built through precise time markers (“after around three days”, “once the larva has reached its full size”, “roughly two weeks after”) rather than vague sequencing words, which is essential for making a cyclical process read as a coherent whole rather than a disconnected list.
Lexical Resource
Accurate biological terminology is used throughout (“pupal stage”, “wax capping”, “moulting”, “drone”) without overreliance on any single term, and the response varies its verbs of change (“hatches”, “grows”, “transformed”, “emerges”) to describe the bee’s development precisely.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
A mixture of passive constructions, appropriate for stages performed on the bee by others (“is fed”, “is sealed”), and active constructions, appropriate for actions the bee performs itself (“chews its way out”, “will mate and begin laying”), is used accurately, along with complex sentences containing semicolons and subordinate clauses that show clear control of a demanding cyclical structure.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the most damaging is treating the life cycle as linear and stopping at “adult bee”, since a cyclical process diagram specifically tests whether the final stage is correctly linked back to the first, and failing to do so misses a core feature of the task.