IELTS Task 1 Table Questions: Choosing What to Ignore

A table in IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 often contains thirty or forty separate numbers. You have twenty minutes and a minimum of 150 words. You cannot report all of it, and you are not supposed to.

This is the part candidates get wrong. They treat the table as a list to be transferred into sentences, run out of words halfway, and finish with an answer that reads like a spreadsheet read aloud. The task is not transfer. It is selection.

This post gives you the selection rule, the sentence patterns that let you group data efficiently, and a full worked answer.

Why a table feels harder than a graph

A line graph draws the trend for you. Your eye sees the shape before you read a single number. A bar chart does the same for comparison. A table draws nothing. It hands you raw figures in rows and columns and leaves the pattern for you to find.

That extra step is exactly what Task Achievement is measuring. Task Achievement is one of the four criteria your Task 1 answer is marked on, alongside Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. For Task Achievement, the descriptor asks you to select and report the main features and make comparisons where relevant. The words select and main are doing real work. An answer that reports everything has selected nothing.

The selection rule

Before you write anything, spend two minutes finding four things. Only four.

1. The highest value in the table. Where is it, and how far above the rest?
2. The lowest value. Same two questions.
3. The biggest change or difference. If the table has years, which row or column moved most? If it has categories only, where is the widest gap?
4. The exception. Which figure does not follow the pattern the others follow?

Those four points are your body paragraphs. Everything else in the table is supporting detail you may quote once if it helps, and may drop entirely if you are short of time.

The overview is written from points 1 and 3 combined. The overview is one or two sentences stating the overall pattern with no small numbers in it, and it is the single most valuable sentence in the answer.

Grouping instead of listing

The second half of the skill is language. Listing sounds like this.

In 2010, France spent 12 percent. In 2010, Germany spent 14 percent. In 2010, Italy spent 9 percent. In 2010, Spain spent 8 percent.

Four sentences, one grammatical pattern, no comparison. Grouping sounds like this.

In 2010, Germany and France spent the most, at 14 and 12 percent respectively, while Italy and Spain both remained below 10 percent.

One sentence, same four numbers, plus a comparison the reader did not have to make themselves. That is the difference between a low and a mid band on both Task Achievement and Grammatical Range.

Here are the grouping structures worth memorising.

Note respectively. It lets you attach two subjects to two numbers in one clause, and it is the highest value word in table writing.

A worked answer

The question. The table below shows the percentage of household income spent on four categories in four countries in 2020.

Finding the four points first. The highest single figure is food in Mexico at 34 percent. The lowest is leisure in Turkey at 4 percent. The widest spread across countries is food, from 15 to 34 percent. The exception is Sweden, which spends more on housing than on food while the other three do the opposite.

The answer.

The table compares how households in four countries divided their spending across four categories in 2020.

Overall, food and housing accounted for the largest shares of spending in every country, while leisure was consistently the smallest. Sweden stood apart as the only country where housing cost more than food.

Food showed the widest variation. Mexican households spent 34 percent of their income on it and Turkish households 30 percent, whereas the Swedish figure was less than half that, at 15 percent. Japan sat between the two groups at 24 percent.

Housing followed the opposite pattern. Sweden recorded the highest proportion at 27 percent, followed by Japan at 22 percent, with Turkey and Mexico spending 20 and 18 percent respectively. Transport was the most stable category, ranging only from 11 percent in Japan to 16 percent in Turkey. Leisure was the smallest everywhere, and particularly low in Turkey and Mexico, where it took just 4 and 5 percent of income.

That answer is roughly 190 words and quotes twelve of the sixteen figures. It leaves four out and loses nothing, because every figure it does quote is doing comparative work.

What to leave out

1. Numbers that repeat a point you already made. If you have said transport was stable, you do not need all four transport figures.
2. Your own explanations. Do not write that Mexicans spend more on food because incomes are lower. The table does not say that. Task 1 asks you to report, not to explain.
3. Everything in the introduction. One sentence paraphrasing the question is enough. Do not preview your findings there; the overview does that.
4. An opinion or a conclusion. Task 1 has no conclusion paragraph. If you have covered the four points, stop.

Two small habits that raise the band

Round in words when the exact figure does not matter. Just over a fifth, roughly a third, fewer than one in ten. This shows range in Lexical Resource and stops your answer sounding like a list of decimals.

Name the unit once and then drop it. If everything is a percentage, write percent in the first comparison and use the figure for Japan afterwards. Repeating the unit twelve times costs words and adds nothing.

Do this today

Take any table question and set a timer for two minutes. Do not write. Just find the highest value, the lowest value, the biggest difference, and the exception, and write those four as bare notes. Then set eighteen minutes and write the answer using only those four notes and the grouping patterns above.

Compare the result with your usual attempt. Most candidates find the selective version is shorter to write, easier to organise, and covers the table better than the complete one did.

If you want a second view on the answer, paste it into Bandly for an estimated band on each of the four criteria with the reasoning behind each estimate. The estimates are produced by software rather than by a human examiner, so treat them as a guide to which criterion is weakest, not as a prediction of your exam result.