The charts below show the changes in ownership of electrical appliances and the amount of time spent doing housework in households in one country between 1920 and 2019.
Sample Response
The first line graph illustrates the percentage of households that owned electrical appliances—namelyappliances - namely washing machines, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners in one country from 1920 to 2019from 1920 to 2019 in one country. The second graph shows the number of hours spent per week on housework per household during the same period.
Overall, ownership of all three appliances increased over time, with refrigerators and vacuum cleaners experiencing the most dramatic growth, eventually reaching universal adoptionnear-universal adoption. Conversely, the average weekly hours spent on housework declined steadily, which shows that increased access to electrical appliances is strongly associated with a marked reduction in household labour over the past century.
In 1920, refrigerators had insignificant ownership in this country, while around 30% of households owned vacuum cleaners and 40% had washing machines. Over the following decades, refrigerator ownership rose sharply, reaching 90% in 1960surpassing 90% by 1960 and reaching 100% by 1980. Vacuum cleaner ownership followed a similar trajectory, hitting 100% by 2000. Washing machine ownership grew gradually, climbing to about 70% by 1960 and approximately 75% by 2019.
In contrast, the time spent on housework decreased significantly from 50 hours per week in 1920 to roughly 15 hours in 1980 remaining at 15 hours through 2000 before falling to 10 hours in 2019before levelling off at around 10 hours by 2019. This trend appears inversely related to the growing adoption of household appliances.
Why this response received Band 8.0
The response presents a strong overview, selects the major changes from both graphs, and develops them in a clear, fluent sequence with precise language. The main limitation is minor loss of accuracy: refrigerator ownership was exactly 90% in 1960, housework hours were flat from 1980 to 2000, and the washing-machine dip is omitted. Prioritise these exceptions and avoid implying a uniformly steady trend when the graph contains a plateau or decline.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
Both graphs are covered with a clear overview and well-selected data, although a few trend details are simplified or slightly inaccurate.
Mention the washing-machine dip from 70% to 65% and the 15-hour plateau between 1980 and 2000, while reporting 1960 refrigerator ownership as exactly 90%.
Coherence and Cohesion
The response is logically sequenced into introduction, overview, appliance trends, and housework trends, with cohesive devices used naturally.
Make the final cross-chart link slightly more concise so the factual description remains the dominant focus.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is flexible, precise, and well suited to trend reporting, with only the phrase ‘insignificant ownership’ sounding slightly unnatural.
Replace that phrase with the more exact ‘only 5% of households owned a refrigerator’ and maintain the same quantitative precision elsewhere.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
A wide range of complex structures is handled accurately, and the response is virtually error-free throughout.
For further refinement, use a comma after the appliance list before ‘from 1920 to 2019’ to prevent momentary attachment ambiguity.
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IELTS Academic Writing Task 1
The charts below show the changes in ownership of electrical appliances and the amount of time spent doing housework in households in one country between 1920 and 2019.
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.