IELTS Task 1 bar chart: how to compare categories

Bar charts compare categories. Sometimes they also show change over time, with one bar for each year. Either way, the skill being tested is comparison: which is biggest, which changed most, and which breaks the pattern.

Work out what kind of bar chart it is

• Categories only (for example, hours spent on five tasks by men and by women). Your job is to rank and compare.
• Categories over time (for example, how people travelled to work in 2005 and 2025). Your job is to compare the categories and describe the change. Use the language of trends as well as comparison.

Find the story before you write

Ask three questions:

1. Which category is largest in each group, and does that change?
2. Which category changed most, up or down?
3. Is there an exception: one category that goes against the others?

In our household tasks sample, women spend more time on every task except one. That exception, repairs, becomes a paragraph of its own, and the total for each group, which is not printed on the chart but is easy to add up, goes in the overview.

Group, do not list

The weakest bar chart answers go through the bars from left to right. Instead, group the categories:

• categories that rose and those that fell,
• categories where group A was higher and where group B was higher,
• the big categories and the small ones.

Then compare inside each group:

In 2005, well over half of all commuters (58%) drove to work, roughly three times as many as took the bus (18%).

Language for comparing

• twice / three times as many as (countable), as much as (uncountable)
• more than double the figure for
• the second most common choice
• slightly / considerably / far higher than
• the only exception to this pattern was

Common bar chart mistakes

• Describing every bar in the order it appears.
• Comparing nothing: a list of figures with no “higher than”, “twice as”, or “by contrast”.
• Writing a total or a cause that the chart does not support. A total you can calculate is fine; a reason you imagine is not.

Practise

Read the commuting and household tasks models, then see the complete Task 1 guide for the structure that works for every type.