The pie charts below describe average household expenditures by major categories in Japan and Malaysia in 2010.
Sample Response
The pie charts depict the distribution of household expenditureproportions of money spent on households in Japan and MalaysiaJapan compared to Malaysia in 2010 across five categoriesbased on five categories namely- housing, transportation, food, healthcare and other goods and services.
As illustrated, the largest share of expendituremost of the expenditures in Japan was allocated towas made on goods and other services, comprising 29% of total expenditure29% of the total expenditures compared with 26% in Malaysiacompared to Malaysia, which only spends 26%. Food was the second-largest categoryFood came as second priority for both countries with 24% and 27% of total household expenditurecosts respectively. Housing was the third-largest category in JapanHousing in Japan is placed as the third priority accounting for 21% of expenditurewith an average of 21% expenditure compared with Malaysia, where housing was the largest categoryin comparison to Malaysia, which places their housing as their major expenditure. Furthermore, money spent for transportation fall as the fourth priority with an average of 20% in Japan and 10% in Malaysia. Lastly, healthcare was observed to be the smallest categorythe least priority in both countries, accounting forfor both countries comprising 6% and 3% of the total expenditures.
Overall, the pie chartsOverall, pie charts indicate that the main expenses in both countries were on goods and services, food and housing, while transportation and healthcare accounted for the smallest shareswere given least prioritised.
Why this response received Band 7.0
The response accurately reports all five spending categories, uses the key percentages effectively, and provides a clear comparative overview. Its main limitation is language control: recurrent agreement, tense, and collocation problems make otherwise accurate comparisons sound awkward. The highest-priority improvement is to retain the strong data selection while using more natural comparison phrases and checking subject-verb agreement throughout.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
The report accurately covers all categories and percentages and highlights the principal similarities and contrasts with a clear overview.
Refine the overview by explicitly contrasting Malaysia’s leading housing share with Japan’s leading other-goods-and-services share.
Coherence and Cohesion
Information is logically sequenced from larger to smaller categories, and paragraphing and linking make the comparison easy to follow.
Place the overview immediately after the introduction and reduce mechanical sequencing such as ‘Furthermore’ and ‘Lastly’.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is sufficiently varied for comparison, but repeated priority language and awkward collocations limit naturalness.
Prefer precise expressions such as accounted for, represented the largest share, and was the smallest category.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
Complex comparisons are attempted successfully, but agreement, tense, pronoun, and complement errors occur in several sentences.
Check plural subject-verb agreement and keep the statistical description consistently in the past tense.
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IELTS Academic Writing Task 1
The pie charts below describe average household expenditures by major categories in Japan and Malaysia in 2010.
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.