The writing section has two tasks and you have one hour to complete both of the tasks. You can start with whichever task you prefer. Task one is worth one-third of your points. It's a shorter task. It has only a 150-word minimum. It's much shorter than task 2, which is worth two-thirds of your points and has a 250-word minimum.
Because of these differences task one, it's recommended that for task one you spend less time than task two. You should spend about 20 minutes on task 1 and 40 minutes on task 2. Task 2 is worth more points. For that simple reason, it's more important to your overall writing score. You should definitely spend more time and effort on the second task.
The first task is going to be a report. And in your report, you're going to have some type of visual information. It's going to be, usually some kind of chart or graph or diagram in some way. There are sometimes map questions where you've got some maps you need to look at and usually there are going to be more than one.
They could be mixed in some way. You might have a chart and some type of diagram, as well. They're both gonna be related to some kind of similar topic. But in your prompt, what you're gonna be guided to do is to take a look at the visual information that's there to report about the main things that you see in the visual and then to make connections between the visuals in some way.
Task two is very different from task one. Task two is going to be a kind of opinion or argument essay. This is very similar to the kinds of essays you've probably written for school before. You're going to have, usually a five-paragraph response with an introduction, body paragraphs, a conclusion and there's gonna be some topic provided to you where you need to provide your perspective on that topic.
Similar to the Reading test, both the General Training and Academic Writing Tests take 60 minutes. And both the tests contain 2 tasks where task 2 is an essay of at least 250 words. The difference comes in task 1, where the Academic test will ask you to describe a table, chart or diagram, while in the General Training Test, you’ll have to write a letter.
