IELTS Task 1 bar chart: Time spent on household tasks by men and women
Bar chartAcademic
The question
The bar chart below shows the average number of hours per week that men and women in one country spent on five household tasks in 2024. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.
Average hours per week spent on household tasks, 2024
- Men
- Women
See the figures as a table
| Cooking | Cleaning | Laundry | Childcare | Repairs | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Men | 4 | 3 | 1 | 6 | 3 |
| Women | 9 | 7 | 4 | 12 | 1 |
Hours per week
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
- Women did far more housework in total (33 hours against 17).
- Women spent more time on every task except repairs; childcare took the longest for both.
How the details are grouped
- The four tasks where women spent more time
- Repairs, the one exception
Model answer
182 wordsThe bar chart compares the time that men and women in one country spent each week on five kinds of household work in 2024.
Overall, women did considerably more domestic work than men, spending 33 hours a week on these tasks in total, compared with 17 hours for men. Women spent more time than men on every task except household repairs, and childcare was the most time-consuming activity for both sexes.
Childcare occupied women for 12 hours a week, twice the figure for men. A similar gap appeared in cooking, at nine hours for women and four for men, and in cleaning, where women spent seven hours, more than double the three hours spent by men. Laundry took relatively little time overall, but women still spent four times as long on it as men did (four hours compared with one).
The only exception to this pattern was repairs. Men devoted three hours a week to fixing things around the home, whereas women spent just one hour on this task. This was the only activity on which men spent more time than women.
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
- The overview adds up the totals (33 and 17 hours), a key feature that is not printed on the chart but is easy to see. The exception, repairs, gets its own paragraph because it breaks the pattern.
- Coherence and Cohesion
- The four tasks that share a pattern are grouped together, then the exception. Comparisons are linked with “a similar gap appeared in” instead of a list of separate sentences.
- Lexical Resource
- Avoids repeating “spent” with occupied, devoted, took. “Domestic work”, “household work” and “time-consuming activity” vary the topic words naturally.
- Grammatical Range and Accuracy
- Comparatives and multiples are used accurately: twice the figure for, more than double, four times as long as. A relative clause and a contrast clause (“whereas…”) in the final paragraph.
Phrases worth reusing
- compared with 17 hours for men
- twice the figure for men
- a similar gap appeared in
- four times as long on it as men did
- the only exception to this pattern