IELTS Writing Task 1 Bar Chart
A practice bar chart in the style of Academic Writing Task 1, with a model answer, the language of comparison, and the slips that cost marks on bar charts. This one has no time scale, so the whole report is about comparing. Write yours first, then put the chart and your report into the checker for a band on all four criteria.
The practice task
The bar chart below compares the average number of hours per week that women and men in Norland spent on five types of unpaid work in 2024. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.
How to write a bar chart report
- Introduction (one sentence). What is compared, for whom, where and when, in your own words.
- Overview (two sentences). The general pattern across all the bars and the most striking exception, with no figures.
- Body paragraph 1. The categories that follow the main pattern, grouped together with their figures.
- Body paragraph 2. The categories that break the pattern, compared directly.
First check whether the chart shows change over time. This one doesn't: it shows one year, so your job is to compare, not to describe trends. Here the main features are: women spent more time on three of the five tasks (exactly twice as long on each), shopping was equal, repairs was the only task where men did more, and childcare took the most time for both.
Model answer
Try the task yourself before reading this. 174 words.
The bar chart compares how many hours a week women and men in Norland spent on five kinds of unpaid work in 2024.
Overall, women did considerably more unpaid work than men, spending more time on three of the five activities. Childcare took up the most time for both sexes, while household repairs was the only task on which men spent longer than women.
The largest gaps were in childcare, cooking and cleaning, where women spent exactly twice as long as men. Women devoted 10 hours a week to childcare, compared with 5 hours for men. Similarly, they spent 8 hours cooking and 6 hours cleaning, while the figures for men were 4 and 3 hours respectively.
The remaining two activities followed a different pattern. Women and men both spent 3 hours a week shopping, the only category in which the figures were equal. Household repairs, by contrast, was the one area where men did more, at 4 hours a week, four times the figure for women, who spent just 1 hour on it.
Why this answer works
- No trend words. Nothing "rose" or "fell", because the chart shows a single year; every sentence compares instead.
- The overview finds the pattern and the exception: women did more overall, but not on repairs.
- Grouping by pattern puts three categories with the same 2-to-1 gap in one paragraph, so the report doesn't walk through the bars one by one.
- "Respectively" lets one sentence carry two pairs of figures without repeating the subject.
- Ratios as well as numbers: "exactly twice as long" and "four times the figure" say more than the hours alone.
- The past simple, because the data is from 2024.
Bar chart vocabulary for IELTS
| Meaning | Words | Example from this task |
|---|---|---|
| Bigger | more than, considerably more, the highest | Women spent considerably more time on childcare than men. |
| Ratios | twice as long as, four times the figure for | Women spent twice as long cooking as men did. |
| The same | equal, the same amount of time, identical | Both groups spent the same amount of time shopping. |
| Contrast | whereas, while, by contrast | Women spent 1 hour on repairs, whereas men spent 4. |
| Two pairs at once | respectively | Men spent 4 and 3 hours on cooking and cleaning respectively. |
| Time spent | spent ... on, devoted ... to, took up | Childcare took up the most time for both sexes. |
Bar charts come in two kinds. When the bars stand for different years, describe change over time with the words from the line graph practice. When they stand for groups or places in one year, as here, compare them and keep trend verbs out.
Bar chart mistakes that cost the most marks
- Trend verbs with no time scale. "Cooking increased to 8 hours" makes no sense when the chart shows one year.
- Going bar by bar. Five categories described in order, each with two numbers, is a list, not a report.
- Missing the exception. The one category that breaks the pattern belongs in the overview.
- Only giving numbers. Say how the figures compare: twice as long, the same, a quarter of.
- Reading the scale wrongly. Check whether the axis shows hours, percentages or thousands before writing a figure.
- Explaining why. "Because men are better at repairs" is an opinion the chart doesn't give, and it costs Task Achievement.
More Academic Task 1 practice: the line graph, pie chart, map and table. Process diagrams can also be checked on the Task 1 checker, and General Training has its own letter practice. For what each band needs, read the Task Achievement band descriptors, explained.