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Exam guide & reading text

C2 Paper 04 — Essay: Read the two texts about responsibility for environmental change — Writing

"C2 Paper 04 — Essay: Read the two texts about responsibility for environmental change" is a C2 Proficiency Writing practice task (Essay). Cambridge assesses content, communicative achievement, organisation and language on a scale from 0 to 5 per criterion. Plan before you write: identify the target reader, the required register and the number of points you must address. At C2, examiners expect sophisticated vocabulary used accurately, varied sentence structures and clear paragraphing.

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How should I approach this C2 writing task?

Plan the Essay before writing, address every prompt point, keep the expected register, respect the word limit, and use feedback to improve content, organisation, grammar range, and vocabulary precision.

Task prompt

Write an essay summarising and evaluating the key points in both texts. Integrate the arguments rather than discussing the texts separately, and use your own ideas to judge how responsibility should be divided between individuals, institutions and public policy.

Word limit: 280 words

Input texts

The Influence of Daily Choice

Large environmental problems cannot be solved by personal virtue alone, but dismissing individual behaviour is equally misleading. Purchasing, travel and food choices create markets, establish social expectations and reveal which policies citizens will accept. Habits also shape political imagination: people who experience workable alternatives are more likely to support wider change. The value of individual action therefore lies less in calculating one person’s direct impact than in making low-impact practices visible and normal. Institutions must provide better options, yet those options gain legitimacy only when people are willing to use, improve and defend them.

Systems Set the Boundaries

Appeals to personal responsibility often focus attention on decisions made within systems that individuals did not design. A commuter cannot choose reliable public transport where none exists, and shoppers cannot avoid excessive packaging when alternatives are unavailable or unaffordable. Companies and governments possess far greater power to reshape infrastructure, prices and standards at scale. Celebrating conscientious consumers may even reduce pressure on those actors by presenting environmental damage as the result of insufficient discipline. Personal action has moral value, but policy should be judged by whether sustainable behaviour becomes ordinary, convenient and economically realistic rather than exceptional.

Assessment criteria

  • Content: All points addressed with relevant detail and examples.
  • Communicative achievement: Appropriate register and tone for the target reader.
  • Organisation: Clear paragraphing with cohesive devices linking ideas.
  • Language: Wide range of vocabulary and structures used with control and accuracy.