IELTS Task 1 table: Visitors to four museums
TableAcademic
The question
The table below shows the number of visitors to four museums in one city in 2014, 2019 and 2024. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.
Visitors to four city museums
| 2014 | 2019 | 2024 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Science Museum | 520 | 610 | 690 |
| History Museum | 480 | 450 | 400 |
| Art Gallery | 300 | 360 | 470 |
| Transport Museum | 150 | 160 | 155 |
Figures are visitors in thousands.
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 Science Museum was the most visited throughout.
- Three museums grew; only the History Museum declined, and the Art Gallery grew the most.
How the details are grouped
- The museums that grew: Science Museum and Art Gallery
- The History Museum's decline and the stable Transport Museum
Model answer
164 wordsThe table shows how many people visited four museums in one city in 2014, 2019 and 2024.
Overall, the Science Museum was the most visited attraction throughout the period, and three of the four museums attracted more visitors in 2024 than in 2014. The only exception was the History Museum, whose popularity declined steadily, while the Art Gallery recorded the most impressive growth.
The Science Museum welcomed 520,000 visitors in 2014, and this figure rose consistently to 610,000 in 2019 and 690,000 in 2024. The Art Gallery began with far fewer visitors, at 300,000, but its numbers increased by more than half over the decade, reaching 470,000 and overtaking the History Museum.
The History Museum, by contrast, was the second most popular museum in 2014, with 480,000 visitors, but it lost visitors in each period, falling to 400,000 by 2024. The Transport Museum remained the least visited of the four, and its numbers hardly changed, fluctuating between 150,000 and 160,000 over the ten years.
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
- A table gives no picture, so the writer has to find the story: the leader, the one museum that declined, and the fastest riser. Not every number is used, only the ones that show those features.
- Coherence and Cohesion
- The museums are grouped by trend, not by the order of the table rows. “By contrast” opens the second body paragraph and makes the contrast explicit.
- Lexical Resource
- Varied subjects and verbs avoid the trap of “X had… Y had…”: welcomed, attracted, recorded, lost visitors, fluctuating between. “Attraction” and “popularity” vary the topic words.
- Grammatical Range and Accuracy
- Numbers are written correctly in full (520,000) and built into sentences with participle clauses (“reaching 470,000 and overtaking…”).
Phrases worth reusing
- the most visited attraction throughout the period
- recorded the most impressive growth
- increased by more than half over the decade
- remained the least visited of the four
- fluctuating between 150,000 and 160,000