IELTS Task 1 bar chart: How people commuted to work
Bar chartAcademic
The question
The bar chart below shows how people travelled to work in one city in 2005 and 2025. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.
Main way of travelling to work (% of commuters)
- 2005
- 2025
See the figures as a table
| Car | Bus | Train | Bicycle | Walking | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | 58% | 18% | 12% | 4% | 8% |
| 2025 | 41% | 16% | 20% | 13% | 10% |
% of commuters
The figures are invented for practice. They are not real statistics.
Write your answer
Then get an estimated band, with checks on your overview, the key features and every figure.
0 words · 150 more to reach 150
Write your own answer first, then compare. Reading a model before you write tends to make you copy it.
The plan
Key features for the overview
- The car stayed most common but lost a lot of ground.
- Train and cycling grew strongly; bus and walking hardly changed.
How the details are grouped
- The modes that fell: car and bus
- The modes that rose: train, bicycle and walking
Model answer
179 wordsThe bar chart compares the main ways in which commuters in one city travelled to work in 2005 and 2025, expressed as percentages.
Overall, the car remained the most common means of getting to work in both years, but its dominance declined considerably. Over the same twenty years, rail travel and cycling grew strongly, while the shares of bus users and pedestrians changed only slightly.
In 2005, well over half of all commuters (58%) drove to work, roughly three times as many as took the bus (18%). By 2025, however, the proportion of drivers had fallen to 41%, the largest change shown on the chart. Bus use also dipped a little, to 16%.
By contrast, the train became a far more popular option, with its share rising from 12% to 20%, so that it overtook the bus as the second most common choice. The most striking growth was in cycling, which more than tripled from just 4% to 13%. Walking, meanwhile, increased marginally, from 8% to 10%, and was the least common way of getting to work by 2025.
The highlighted paragraph is the overview. Scored by the MyBandPrep checker on 7 October 2026. An estimate, not an examiner’s mark. How scoring works
Why it works
- Task Achievement
- Every category is covered with both years, and the changes are ranked: the car's fall is called the largest change and cycling the most striking growth. Nothing is invented about why people switched.
- Coherence and Cohesion
- The body splits the chart into falls and rises, so each paragraph has one job. “By contrast” turns the essay between the two halves.
- Lexical Resource
- Ways of saying percentage of commuters are varied: proportion of drivers, bus use, its share, well over half. Verbs match the size of each change: dipped, increased marginally, more than tripled.
- Grammatical Range and Accuracy
- Past perfect for change measured up to 2025 (“had fallen to 41%”) and participle clauses (“with its share rising from…”) add range without strain.
Phrases worth reusing
- the most common means of getting to work
- its dominance declined considerably
- well over half of all commuters
- the largest change shown on the chart
- more than tripled from just 4% to 13%