Band 7 sample answer
I'd like to talk about an athletics meeting I watched at Kasarani, the big stadium in Nairobi. It was a few years ago, a national trials event, where athletes were competing for places in the Kenyan team for an international championship.
I went with my father and my younger brother. My father ran the 1,500 metres at school level when he was young, so for him athletics is almost a religion, and he'd been promising to take us for years. We took a matatu early in the morning and arrived when the stadium was still half empty, but by the afternoon it was full and incredibly loud.
The race I remember most was the men's 5,000 metres. For most of the race the runners stayed in a tight group, and it looked quite slow, honestly. Then, with about two laps to go, one young runner, who nobody around us seemed to know, suddenly moved to the front and just kept accelerating. The whole crowd stood up. My father was shouting his name before he even knew it, and the man next to us was explaining that this boy came from a village near his home.
He won by maybe ten metres, and I've never heard a noise like that in my life.
I think I remember it for two reasons. First, it was completely different from watching on TV, because you could feel how fast they were going, and you could see the tired faces at the end. And second, it was one of the few days I spent with my father and brother doing something we all loved equally. My father still talks about it whenever athletics is on television.