IELTS Writing Task 1: real statistics

A good place to find 'real' descriptions of graphs and charts is a government statistics website like this one for the UK. If you click on the different themes, you'll see graphs, charts and written summaries of recent statistics for the country.

Here's an example summary from the website:

The employment rate for those aged from 16 to 64 for the three months to June 2012 was 71.0 per cent. This is the highest figure since the three months to May 2009 and it is up 0.4 percentage points on the previous quarter. The number of people in employment aged 16 and over increased by 201,000 on the quarter to reach 29.48 million, the largest quarterly increase since the three months to July 2010. The number of people in employment was 96,000 lower than the pre-recession peak of 29.57 million recorded for March-May 2008.

Note:
I've underlined the verbs in the paragraph above. As I said last week, we tend to use 'easy' verbs when describing statistics.

Comments

[Nhi]

Great resource for Task 1. Thank u very much!

[siya]

can we use present past tense in task one please somebody ans me

[musharaf]

you can use either present r past tense.how can they both be in a single situation?

[siya]

thanks musharaf dt ws the confusion,bt nw clear

[Nhi]

Should we use "dominate", "predominate" and "outweigh" as in some books?

[sam]

HI SIMON in spelling how many marks get deducted for thr wrong one?? or is the answer considered wrong?? like the spelling is niether british nor american??

[Jo]

This is very useful! Thank you so much.

[Simon]

FROM SIMON:

I no longer have time to answer everyone's questions individually. However, I do read them all, and I'll try to answer some of them in a lesson each Saturday.

[veljko]

Hi Simon,

Do i need to write numbers with letters(three) or are just numbers(3) fine?

[chaminda]

Dear Simon ,

I need to clarify few questions about writing module in IELTS.

In writing answer script ,do we need to write whole space they provided or only the word requirement? For example 150 words etc.
If I write less then the space provided ,will I lose mark?

[murali603]

Dear Simon,

whether we can write task 1 and task2 with Pencil? so that if i feel i did some thing wrong then i can able to correct it by erasing.

is it ok? One of my friend written with pencil but he scored some less score. He told that using pencil might lead to less score?

[jyot]

Dear Simon,

As I'm new here for prepairing my IELTS Test and don't have any tutor at my place.
I've written a Writing Task-1 taken from the link below. Please help me to cure my mistakes.And mention score for this so that I can calculate my progress on the daily basis.

http://ielts.studyhorror.com/writings/money-spent-and-consumption-of-fast-food-in-britian/3

The bar chart reveals the proportion of fast food counsumption per week and linear chart depicts trends for the same from 1970 to 1990 in Britain.

After skimming both the graphs, it is lucid that Britishrs spent money on fast food according to thier income level and they liked to have hamburgers more than other fast food item from the year 1970 to 1990.

British people, who earned high incentives spent more than 40% money to taste hamburgers and the preffered pizza rather fish and chips. The expenditure on fast food declined as the average earning Britishers spent approximately 30% on hamburgers but spent more on fish and chips (25%) than high income group. The low income group did not spend much on fast foods, they liked to eat fish and chips more than hamburgers and pizza.

In 1970, the demanded for pizza was 300 units which gradully declined to approximately 200 units till 1990. However, conmumption of fish and chips was only 100 units in 1970 but it increased swiftly to 500 units. Hmburger was consumed comparitively very less, less than 50 units in 1970 and gradully increased near 300 units in the year 1990.