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A bar chart – organising your answer

► IELTS Vocabulary
► IELTS Writing
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Much of the difficulty in academic IELTS part 1 is knowing how to organise your answer. This post shows
you one way to do this when the diagram is a bar chart. I talk about paragraphs, but what you really need
to understand is that this is a visual task. You need to be write so that someone else can “see” the
diagram.

This post shows you one to organise your task 1 with a step-by-step guide and has the added bonus of an
interactive quiz on comparison language.

The key skill – paragraphing

The key skill is to make sure that you write in organised paragraphs – just as you would in an essay. This
is so important because it will not just improve your coherence and cohesion band scores, but it will also
make the report easier to write. To do this, we need to identify key features that will make the topics of the
paragraphs. When we have done that, we can look for the details that explain those features.

What are key features?

Normally, they are obvious. Never ignore the obvious. Look at the bar chart below and what do you see?

What you should see is this:

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A bar chart – organising your answer | http://www.dcielts.com/ielts-writing/bar-chart-organising-answer/

2. some lines are longer than others

Those are your key features that you must highlight in your report as paragraph topics. Everything else is
detail.

Tip: Think visually. Look for the obvious and ignore any writing when you first look at a chart. Close your
eyes. What do you remember? It’s easy to be confused by detail.

What are supporting details?

Let’s now look at the complete chart.

Key features
We now see what the 2 key features that need to be reported are. Remember these will be the topics of
our 2 content paragraphs :

1. the distinction between men and women (the blue lines and the red lines)
2. how certain purposes of travel are more common than others (how long the lines are)

Supporting detail: men and women

Looking at the blue and red lines this is what I see and needs to be included:

1. little or no difference in “walking” “holidays” and “personal business”

2. more men in “education”, “entertainment” and “commuting”
3. more women in “school run”, “visiting friends” and “shopping”
4. many more women in “school run” (5% difference)
5. many more men in “commuting” (8% difference)

Supporting detail: purposes

This is fairly straightforward as all you need to do is arrange the different categories into an order showing
the most common and least common purposes.

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A bar chart – organising your answer | http://www.dcielts.com/ielts-writing/bar-chart-organising-answer/

1. commuting and shopping much the most common (around 20% average)
2. visiting friends and school run both around 15% average
3. personal business just under 10% average
4. sport/entertainment around 7% average just more than education at 6%
5. least common is walking and holidays at around 3% each

Note the % figures here are averages of the male/female numbers.

Tip: when you have many different categories, it is a good idea to group them together under a few
headings

A possible answer
There are, of course, many possible answers to this task. Here is one solution.

This bar chart shows the different reasons for making journeys in the UK in 2006 and how males
and females differed in this.

It is immediately apparent that the most common purposes for travelling were commuting and
shopping, both being around 20 per cent of trips. The next most common reasons were visiting
friends and doing the school run at 15%, closely followed by personal business at around 10%.
Travelling for sport and entertainment (7%) was only just more common than journeys for
educational purposes (6%). Finally, the fewest number of trips were travelling for holidays and
walking, both of which accounted for around 3 per cent of all journeys.

Typically, there were few major differences between males and females. In holidays, personal
business and walking both sexes took approximately the same amount of journeys, while slightly
more men travelled for educational purposes and more women visited friends. Notably, almost
twice as many men as women travelled for entertainment reasons and, likewise, around 7%
more men commuted to work. The two areas in which women travelled significantly more than
men were shopping and the school run.

Test your comparison vocabulary/grammar

In this form of writing comparisons are crucial. Indeed, they are perhaps the most important grammar item
in academic task 1. So why not test yourself with this exercise? See if you can re-use the comparison
language from my example.

comparison quiz

Tip: try to vary the language you use to make comparisons. One way to do this is use adverbs such as
“significantly”

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21 Responses to A bar chart – organising your answer

Renata January 7, 2011 at 6:31 pm # REPLY

Hello,

i found the task really greatly done, however, i have a querie. For what i have been reading, you
always say that we should not try to put all the data in our writing and here, you actualy did
that…..

Renata January 8, 2011 at 3:31 pm # REPLY

So in this model of answer there is no such a thing as a conclusion?

Mari Boy Bruan February 24, 2011 at 2:22 am # REPLY

Hi, just a question. I enrolled in a review center here in the Philippines, and they told
us that we cannot use the word “how”in our introduction Because I noticed that you commonly

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used the word in your introduction

By the way, an outstanding site for IELTS, I must say!

And I regret that I only learned about this site just today

Dominic Cole June 18, 2011 at 5:09 pm # REPLY

I am always suspicious of advice that says you should never do something but all
teachers have their own preferences. The question you need to answer is “Does it work?”

eleni June 18, 2011 at 3:49 pm # REPLY

hello,
i’m really greatfull i found this site, even 2 weeks before my examination.
Is there sth about flow charts? I think it has completely different demands.
I’m so worried about time management in writing. I’ll definitely try your tips.
Thanks Dominic.

AK September 9, 2011 at 5:07 am # REPLY

I have a question maybe It seems stupid, :S

how I can know that % figures are percentages or averages ?

Thank u teacher, your lessons are helpful !

Dominic Cole September 9, 2011 at 6:36 am # REPLY

% is simply the symbol for percentage.

The general rule is you need to read the title for the chart/graph to understand what the
figures relate to. If the title reads the “The average number of people who bought a
television”, then you know that the figures relate to averages.

I hope that this does not confuse you but it is possible that the numbers you see are
percentages, but those percentages are average figures.

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AK September 10, 2011 at 11:26 pm # REPLY

Thank you teacher It’s became clear to me now

I have another question , can we use the word ” proportion ” instead of ” percentage ” in this
type to avoid repeating the word “percentage”.?

I hope I do not annoy with my questions,

Dominic Cole September 11, 2011 at 8:31 am # REPLY

Indeed yes. “Proportion” is a key task 1 word. Keep on asking questions.

AK October 7, 2011 at 11:59 am # REPLY

I got the acceptance score

thank you teacher , really your website help me alot

Stefan October 10, 2011 at 8:42 pm # REPLY

Thanks for your help – I finally reached 7, it would not have been possible without
your site.

OK November 6, 2011 at 9:20 pm # REPLY

Hi there,

Thank you for the wonderful website!

The test at all isn’t too bad for me, but I just can’t seem to get this part right. No matter how
many times I’ve tried to write a good essay on a graph/chart, I just couldn’t do it.

I get stuck from the flow of information, I can see trends, but too many! If I try to start with
one of them, then I find myself missing the others. Eventually, I’m left with a poor written
piece of nothing

The first essay is really holding me back on my study to the test. What can I do to improve?
How can I be knocked out of the “information shock” I’m getting everytime I face the
graphs/charts essay assignment?

Please help,

O.

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A bar chart – organising your answer | http://www.dcielts.com/ielts-writing/bar-chart-organising-answer/

Dominic Cole December 6, 2011 at 5:11 am #

It’s not easy. I’m hoping to publish more on this soon. Hope that helps.

dr zahoor November 16, 2011 at 4:01 am # REPLY

sir you have simplyfied so much that every body is able to understand.thanks

Yuliang Zhang June 6, 2012 at 6:11 pm # REPLY

Sir, I really appreciate what you have done, this website is just fantastic for learning
IELTS.

saccyninza September 11, 2012 at 1:20 am # REPLY

it’s a pleasure to get a guidance frm you…..this site is simply the best…
the main thing is wen v study we neva feel of endurance…..great work !!!

not comments at all only compliments

Marianna January 4, 2013 at 2:43 am # REPLY

The site is very helpfull!!But i can not view the pictures.Is there a temporary technical
problem ?

Dominic Cole February 22, 2013 at 12:15 am # REPLY

Yes, it was i apologise. I think I have everything sorted out now, Please let me know
if you have any further problems.

Do Hung March 21, 2013 at 10:27 pm # REPLY

I find this website exceptional great. There are many websites, books to teach IELTS
out there but this site is very different. It teaches me to become a better IELTS scorer and all of
what you teach are very practical. I hope I could get high scores next Saturday thank to your
resources.

Dominic Cole March 21, 2013 at 10:40 pm # REPLY

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A bar chart – organising your answer | http://www.dcielts.com/ielts-writing/bar-chart-organising-answer/

Best of luck. Let me know how it goes.

Anonymous November 6, 2014 at 7:07 pm # REPLY

Thanks very much dominic

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