Guides / Task 1 mechanics
Which Tense for IELTS Task 1? Read the Dates, Not the Chart
Candidates lose marks in Academic Writing Task 1 for a reason that has nothing to do with the data. They describe a chart about 1990 using present simple, or a chart with no dates at all using past simple, and the error repeats in every sentence.
The fix is not a rule about bar charts or line graphs. It is a habit: read the dates in the chart title and on the axis before you write your first sentence. Those dates decide the tense. The chart type does not.
The decision table
Academic Task 1 gives you a visual and asks you to describe it. Here is how the time information in that visual maps to the tense you write in.
| What the chart says about time | Tense | Example sentence |
|---|---|---|
| Past dates, finished period, such as 1990 to 2010 | Past simple | Car ownership rose steadily between 1990 and 2010. |
| Past dates up to now, such as 2015 to the present | Present perfect, or past simple for the completed years | Car ownership has risen since 2015. |
| No dates anywhere | Present simple | More men than women work in construction. |
| Future dates or the word projected, estimated, forecast | Future form | The population is expected to reach ten million by 2040. |
| A period that starts in the past and runs into the future | Both, and the change happens at the present | Numbers rose until 2020 and are projected to fall after 2030. |
| A process diagram with no dates | Present simple, usually passive | The beans are dried and then roasted. |
| A map labelled with two past years | Past simple | The farmland to the north was replaced by housing. |
| A map labelled now, or today, against a past year | Past simple for the old state, present simple for the current one | The site was open farmland in 1980. It now contains a retail park. |
Two of these rows account for most of the marks lost.
The no dates row. Charts without a time period exist, and they are more common than candidates expect: a bar chart comparing employment by sector, a pie chart of household spending with no year, a table of exam entries by subject. There is nothing finished to describe, so present simple is correct and past simple is wrong in every sentence. If the data has no year, you are comparing, not narrating.
The projected row. The words projected, estimated and forecast in a chart title are instructions about tense. Any year after the year you are sitting the test is a future, and writing in 2045 the figure rose is an error you will repeat in each sentence about that part of the chart.
Why this is a Grammatical Range and Accuracy problem
Academic Task 1 is marked on four criteria: Task Achievement, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy.
A wrong tense lands in that last criterion, and it lands badly for one reason. The descriptors for Grammatical Range and Accuracy describe how many of your sentences are error free. A tense choice made once in your head and applied to twelve sentences is not one error. It is twelve sentences with an error in them, and almost nothing else you can do in 150 words damages that proportion as efficiently.
It also reaches Task Achievement. If a chart shows a projection and you describe the projection as something that happened, you have reported the data inaccurately, and accurate reporting of key features is what that criterion asks for.
Before and after
Five sentences candidates write, with the correction and the reason. The chart in each case is stated.
Chart: Percentage of households with internet access, 2000 to 2015.
Before. The percentage of households with internet access increases from 20 per cent in 2000 to 80 per cent in 2015. After. The percentage of households with internet access increased from 20 per cent in 2000 to 80 per cent in 2015.
The period ended. Present simple describes a general truth, and 2015 is not a general truth.
Chart: Employment by sector in one country, no year given.
Before. More people worked in services than in agriculture. After. More people work in services than in agriculture.
Nothing tells you when this was, so there is nothing to put in the past.
Chart: Population of three cities, 1990 to 2020 with projections to 2050.
Before. The population of city A grew until 2020 and continued to grow until 2050. After. The population of city A grew until 2020 and is projected to continue growing until 2050.
The second half of that line is a forecast on the page, not a fact. Is expected to, is projected to and will probably all work.
Chart: Two maps of a town centre, 1985 and today.
Before. In 1985 there is a market in the square, and in the present day there was a car park. After. In 1985 there was a market in the square. Today the square contains a car park.
The tenses are the right way round in the corrected version, and splitting the sentence makes the contrast visible.
Diagram: How glass bottles are recycled.
Before. Workers collected the bottles and then they crushed them. After. The bottles are collected and then crushed.
A process has no date. Present simple passive is the normal register here, and it also removes the invented workers, who are not in the diagram.
The overview sentence, with the tense in it
The overview is the sentence that states the main trend or the main difference rather than individual numbers, and it is where your tense choice becomes visible first. Two examples from the same chart family.
With dates, finished period. Overall, internet access rose sharply across the whole period, while the gap between urban and rural households narrowed after 2008.
With no dates. Overall, services employ the largest share of workers in every region, and agriculture employs the smallest.
Both are one sentence, both name the main pattern, and the tense in each follows the chart rather than the chart type.
General Training Task 1 is a different question
If you are sitting General Training, Task 1 is a letter, not a chart, and tense follows what you are writing about. A complaint about something that happened takes past simple. A request takes present and future forms. An invitation describing an event that has not happened yet takes a future form.
Task 2 decides its tense a different way again, by the job each sentence is doing rather than by a date, and tenses for Task 2 sets that out. The one habit that carries across every version of the test is the same: decide the time frame before the first sentence, not during the fourth.
What to do today
- Find five Task 1 visuals and do not write answers for them. Write only the dates in the title and on the axis, then the tense you would use, then one sentence in it.
- Add the projection case deliberately. Take a chart with past data, invent nothing, and simply practise the sentence is projected to, which many candidates have never written.
- Reread two Task 1 answers you have already written and check the tense of every verb against the dates. Count the sentences you would have to change. That number is the one worth lowering.
Checking tense across a whole answer by eye is slow, and it is the kind of error that hides in sentences you have read five times. Pasting your answer into Bandly returns an estimated band for each of the four criteria and lists the specific sentences behind the Grammatical Range and Accuracy estimate, which is usually where a tense problem shows up. The bands are estimates from a scoring engine rather than marks from an examiner, so treat them as a way to find the sentences, then fix them yourself.
Find out what this essay would score
Paste your own answer and Bandly returns an estimated band for each of the four criteria, with the sentences that pulled the score down. Under a cent an essay, about six seconds.
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