The chart below shows the changes in sales of four different types of books from 2002 to 2012.
Sample Response
The bar graph compares the sales of four book genres between 2002 andto 2012. Overall, sales of history bookshistory books vend increased remarkably while the sales of hobby-related booksadmiration for hobby related books declined over the period. As is presented in the illustration, history books had the highest demand in the market as they recordedit made about 4,500 copies soldmore than 4000 trades in 2002. That year,In this year the sale of hobby related books was the lowest, less than 1000, while entertainment and art books each recorded around 2,000 copiesaround 2000 sales volume. After 4 years, sales of history books almost doubledhistory books trade doubled while art and entertainment categories each made approximately 3,000 copiesapproximately 3000 sales. Hobby books’ demand slightly increased in 2002 but dropped in 2004. In all the following years, the sales of hobby books remained constant and had always been the lowest around 200 sales. By contrastOn the contrary, sales of history bookshistory books’ sale reachedreached to 10,000over 10,000 in 2008, the peak for the sale of any genre of books, and finally stood at around 9 thousand9.5 thousand in 2012. Moreover, sales of entertainment and art books weredemand for entertainment and art books were almost the same in 2006 and 2008, just over 3000, but in subsequent yearson the subsequent years, sales of art books exceeded those of entertainment booksart books sales outranked the entertainment books sales.
Why this response received Band 6.5
The response gives a clear overview and covers the main movements, especially the strong rise in history-book sales and the persistent weakness of hobbies books. However, several dates and figures are imprecise, and awkward word choices and recurring grammatical errors reduce precision. The highest-priority improvement is to verify each comparison against the chart and express figures with conventional sales vocabulary and consistently accurate sentence structures.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
A clear overview and most major trends are reported, but the timing of the hobbies change and several figures are slightly inaccurate.
Check every year-value pairing and state that hobbies rose to 2004 before falling, while history peaked at about 10,000 in 2008.
Coherence and Cohesion
The response follows a generally logical chronology, though placing all details in one paragraph and using some mechanical transitions weakens the organisation.
Separate the overview from two grouped detail paragraphs and use comparisons rather than repeated sequencing phrases.
Lexical Resource
The vocabulary covers trends and comparisons, but frequent miscollocations such as ‘vend’, ‘trades’, and ‘admiration’ reduce precision.
Use standard chart language such as sales rose, copies sold, demand fell, and exceeded.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
A mix of sentence forms communicates the message, but agreement, preposition, possessive, and noun-form errors recur.
Proofread subject-verb agreement and noun phrases, especially history-book sales, art-book sales, and rose to.
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IELTS Academic Writing Task 1
The chart below shows the changes in sales of four different types of books from 2002 to 2012.
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.