IELTS Task 1 Bar Chart Samples: Band 6, 6.5 and 7.5 Compared (Part 2 of 3): The Band 6.5 and Band 7.5 Essays

3. The band 6.5 essay: coffee habits in five Australian cities (TA 5, CC 8) (continued)

Score card

My original essay

This is the version I submitted for marking, unedited (typos and grammar mistakes kept).

Why this essay got a 6.5

Task Achievement 5: a perfect overview, but the body has misreadings, contradictions and omissions. This essay is the best counter-example. Both judgements in the overview (going to a café was the most common habit except in Adelaide; buying fresh coffee was the least common in every city) are completely correct, and CC even got an 8. But TA was only 5, and every reason for that is in the body:

• The scale misread by 10 percentage points. As for Brisbane and Adelaide … both of them make up just below 45% of the total: the fresh coffee figure for these two cities is about 34.5%, so it should be just below 35%. If it really were 45%, they would be higher than Sydney and Melbourne, which directly contradicts the ranking in the previous sentence. The vertical axis on this chart starts at 20% with a gridline every 5%, so it is easy to miscount by one line.
• Numbers in the same paragraph contradict each other. The instant coffee paragraph first says a variation between roughly 46% and 54%, and the next sentence says Sydney was about 43%, which is not between 46 and 54. In fact Sydney was about 45.5%.
• An unsupported comparison. the percentage gap between each city is not as big as the other two results: the spread across the five cities for instant coffee is about 9 percentage points (45.5–54.5), and for fresh coffee it is also about 9 (34.5–43.5). It is not smaller.
• Cities left out. The fresh coffee paragraph does not mention Hobart (about 38.5%), and the café paragraph does not mention Brisbane (about 55.5%). The overview says Adelaide is the exception, but the body never says which habit was most common in Adelaide.
• Treating survey percentages like a pie chart. make up … of the total and contributes the smallest percentage are ways of describing “a share of a whole”. But on this chart each city’s figure for each habit is a separate percentage; the three habits do not add up to 100%.

Against the band descriptors, these points add up to “key features presented but not adequately covered, with inaccurate detail”. In a 196-word essay with a 10-point misreading, a self-contradiction, a false comparison and two missing cities, TA is unlikely to go above 5, even with a perfect overview.

Coherence & Cohesion 8: structure is the strongest part of this essay. Each of the three habits gets its own paragraph, and within each paragraph I give the highest city first and then the lowest, so the reader can follow easily. There is one Regarding, one Moving to and one As for, one per paragraph, without overdoing it. more than three-fifths of residents … do so uses do so to avoid repeating the verb, which is a natural form of reference. It also shows that CC and TA are marked separately: however clear your structure, inaccurate content still costs you TA marks.

Lexical Resource 6: the marks were lost for word errors and collocation: Hobert is misspelt (though spelt correctly elsewhere in the same essay), went to a cafe is a most common habit should be going to a café was the most common habit, contributes is the wrong verb for a survey percentage, and in the opening habit of purchasing and drinking is missing its object (purchasing and drinking what?).

Grammatical Range & Accuracy 7: the survey is about the previous four weeks, so it needs the past tense, but present forms such as is, go to, make up, has are mixed with past forms such as bought, went. the only city which less than half of residents went to a cafe should be in which.

4. The band 7.5 essay: government spending on transport in four countries

What the task shows

This was a practice question I found online (Essay 40). I wrote it on 29 June 2024, untimed, and it is about 200 words. The chart shows the percentage of government spending that went on roads and transport in Italy, Portugal, the UK and the USA in 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005, with four bars for each country. (The chart labels Italy as “Italia”, so I used that name.)

Score card

My original essay

This is the version I submitted for marking, unedited (typos and grammar mistakes kept).

Why this essay got a 7.5

Task Achievement 7–8: one overview sentence covers the main trend, and almost every number in the body is right. The overview, the proportion of the authorities’ expenditure on transport decreased in Italia, Portugal, and the UK, while that in the USA witnessed an upward trend, goes straight to “three down, one up”, and the USA is clearly marked as the exception. The body covers all four countries in all four years, with only two errors: for the UK in 2000 I wrote approximately 13% when it was about 12%, and for the UK in 2005 I wrote about 7% when it was about 8%. Compared with the first two essays, the accuracy is on a completely different level.

The real highlight of this essay is how it groups the countries. If you group by size, the obvious pairs are Italy + Portugal (high percentages) and the UK + USA (low percentages). But I put Italy and the UK together because they have the same shape: down in 1995, up to a peak in 2000, down to their lowest in 2005. I put Portugal and the USA together because both moved in one direction only, one falling steadily and one rising steadily. This grouping gives each paragraph a clear topic sentence, and it adds a further layer to the “three down, one up” overview.

What was missing for TA 9? First, the overview could add a sentence comparing scale: the percentages for Italy and Portugal were roughly double those for the UK and the USA. Second, one ranking change is not mentioned: in 2000 Italy (about 23.5%) overtook Portugal (about 22.5%), the only one of the four years in which Portugal was not top. Third, the two small UK figures could be more accurate.

Coherence & Cohesion 8: both body paragraphs have clear topic sentences (both fluctuated during the time frame, the trends were totally different), and they are held together with the former / the latter, However and As for the USA, so the referencing is clear.

Lexical Resource 7: authorities’ expenditure, over a period of fifteen years, dipped, recovered, finishing the period at are all appropriate, and the paraphrase of the task is varied. The marks were lost for far fewer: for a proportion you need far lower or much smaller, because fewer only goes with countable nouns.

Grammatical Range & Accuracy 8: this has the best grammar of the three: participle clauses (Beginning with …, Starting at …), a with absolute construction and contrasts joined by semicolons are all handled confidently. A few errors such as with Italia reached (should be reaching) do not affect the overall high accuracy.