Survey Response: Choosing a Side and Defending It
Task 2 is not an email and neither option is correct. What is scored is whether you chose one and defended it for 180 words without wobbling.
What Task 2 asks and what it does not
Task 2, Responding to Survey Questions, gives you a situation and two options labelled A and B. You select one and justify it in roughly 150 to 200 words, in about 26 minutes.
It is not an email. No subject line, no greeting, no sign-off, no name. Carrying email furniture over from Task 1 is one of the clearest signals of a misread task, and Task Fulfilment absorbs the cost immediately.
Neither option is correct, and your opinion is not scored. The criterion is explicit that a candidate must argue for the option they selected, and that arguing for a different option or selecting none is penalised heavily. The entire marking interest is in whether you committed and how well you developed the commitment.
That has a practical consequence that surprises people: the weaker-sounding option often produces the higher score. A candidate who picks the popular option tends to assume its merits are obvious and writes three sentences of assertion. A candidate who picks the unpopular one knows they have to argue, and argument is what the criteria reward.
The four-part shape
One: the commitment, one sentence. Name the option by its label and its content. I would choose Option B, extending the library's evening hours. Label alone is thin, content alone risks a mismatch with the selection control.
Two: the first reason, developed. Claim, mechanism, consequence. Roughly five sentences.
Three: the second reason, from a different angle, with the example. Roughly five sentences, and this is where your one concrete example belongs.
Four: the concession and the close. Acknowledge a genuine strength of the option you rejected, answer it, and restate your choice. Two or three sentences.
That is four paragraphs and about 180 words. The proportions matter more than the exact sentence counts: the two reasons together should be at least two thirds of the response, because that is where all the development marks are.
Two reasons that are genuinely two
The most common structural failure in Task 2 is two reasons that are the same reason. It would help students and it would be good for young people in the town is one idea written twice, and Content and Coherence treats a repeated idea as undeveloped rather than as a second point.
The reliable fix is to make your two reasons affect two different groups. Users and taxpayers. Students and staff. Residents and local businesses. Short term and long term. If your two reasons come from two different stakeholders, they cannot collapse into each other.
Then develop each one through a mechanism rather than an intensifier. The library is more useful is a claim with an adjective. The library already has the building, the staff and the heating, so extending its hours costs the town wages rather than construction is a claim with a mechanism, and the second version is roughly the same length.
A useful discipline while drafting: after every claim, ask which means and write the next sentence. The arena would only serve registered teams, which means the building would sit unused on the afternoons when most families are free. That single question converts assertion into development.
The example, and why it has to be concrete
An answer made entirely of reasons stays abstract, and abstraction caps the response. One specific example is worth more than a third reason, and it is the cheapest development you can buy.
Concrete means it contains at least two of: a number, a time, a place, a person, an outcome. Many people would use it is not an example. Last winter the community centre ran a homework club on Tuesday evenings, and it filled all thirty places within a week is an example, and it can be entirely invented.
Invented examples are acceptable. The task is not checking facts about your town, and there is no town. What it is checking is whether you can make an argument specific. Treat the example as a small scene with edges rather than a general statement with numbers bolted on.
Place the example inside the second reason rather than in its own paragraph. An example floating alone reads as a digression; an example that immediately follows the claim it supports reads as development.
Choose your two reasons from two different stakeholders, such as users and the budget. Reasons drawn from the same group tend to be one reason restated, and a restated reason scores as undeveloped rather than as a second point.
The concession, and how not to lose the argument in it
Most candidates argue only for their own option. The marks in the final third sit in showing that you have understood the other one and answered it.
A concession has two halves and you must write both. Concede a real strength, then neutralise it. A new arena would certainly serve the hockey programme, which currently rents ice time in the next town. Even so, it would stand empty for most of the week, while a library with longer hours is in use every evening.
What ruins a concession is conceding without answering. Of course, Option A also has many advantages and some residents would prefer it hands the reader a point and never takes it back, and at that stage the response is drifting rather than conceding.
The safeguard is the closing sentence. Restate your option by name in the final line: For these reasons, extending the library's hours is the better use of the budget. If your final sentence names the option you did not choose, you have drifted and the task has not been fulfilled.
A full Task 2 answer
Survey: your town has $400,000 to spend on one community project. Option A, a new sports arena. Option B, extending the public library's evening and weekend hours for five years. Which do you choose, and why?
I would choose Option B, extending the public library's evening and weekend hours.
My first reason is that the library already exists. The building, the collection and most of the staff are in place, so the money would pay for wages and heating rather than for construction. That difference matters over five years: a new arena would need maintenance and repairs from the day it opened, while longer library hours can be reduced or extended as demand changes.
My second reason is that the library serves more of the town at once. An arena is used by registered teams at booked times, but a library on a Tuesday evening holds students finishing assignments, newcomers using the language shelves and older residents reading the newspapers. Last winter the library ran a homework club on two evenings a week, and all thirty places were taken within a fortnight, which suggests the demand is already there.
A new arena would certainly help the hockey programme, which currently rents ice time in a neighbouring town. Even so, that programme serves a few dozen families, while the library is open to everyone who walks in. For these reasons, extending the library's hours is the better use of the budget.
That is 197 words: commitment, two reasons from two different angles, one invented but concrete example, a concession that is answered, and a closing line that names the option again.
After each claim, write the words "which means" and finish the sentence. It converts an assertion into a mechanism, which is the difference this criterion actually measures.
Practise it
Five judgements on commitment, development and concession in Task 2.