IELTS Writing Task 1: Every Question Type, With a Marked Answer for Each

Task 1 is the smaller half of the Writing paper: 150 words, 20 minutes, and one third of your Writing band. It is also the half candidates lose marks on for reasons that have nothing to do with their English.

The most common reason is describing everything. The question does not ask for everything. It asks you to select the main features and report them, and a student who writes down every number on the chart has answered a question nobody set.

This page names each thing Task 1 can put in front of you, says what that specific type is asking for, and links to a marked answer where the library has one.

What Task 1 is marked on

Four criteria, each scored 0 to 9 in whole bands, then averaged.

Task Achievement is the Task 1 name for the first criterion. It asks whether you selected the important features, reported them accurately, and included an overview. Getting a number wrong hurts here.

Coherence and Cohesion is organisation: paragraphs, order, and links between sentences.

Lexical Resource is vocabulary, including the language of change and comparison that Task 1 leans on heavily.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy covers sentence structures, tenses and punctuation. Task 1 rewards tense control, because you are usually describing a fixed period in the past.

The overview sentence

Before the six types, one rule that applies to all of them.

Every Task 1 Academic answer needs an overview: one or two sentences saying what the whole picture shows, without numbers. Highest and lowest. Rising or falling. What changed most.

An answer with no overview is capped low on Task Achievement no matter how accurate the detail is. Write it as your second paragraph, straight after the paraphrased question, and write it before you write any detail. It is the cheapest mark in the paper.

The six question types

Line graph

Something measured over time. The question is almost always about trends rather than points: what went up, what went down, what crossed what.

The trap is reading the graph as a list of years. A band 6 answer says what each line did in 2010, then 2011, then 2012. A band 7 answer groups the whole period into two or three movements and gives a date only when the date is the point.

Marked answer: household electricity use, estimated band 7.0. Every line graph answer in the library sits on one page.

Bar chart

Comparison between categories, sometimes at more than one point in time. The main feature is usually a gap, not a value.

The trap is comparing nothing. Listing six bars in order is description without comparison, and comparison is what the criterion asks for. Language of difference does the work here: twice as many, slightly higher than, roughly equal to.

Marked answer: commuting by transport type, estimated band 7.5. More on the bar chart page.

Pie chart

Proportions of a whole, often two or three pies to compare. Percentages, so the vocabulary is about share rather than amount.

The trap is treating a change in share as a change in quantity. If one slice grows from 20 percent to 30 percent, the underlying number may have fallen; the pie only tells you the proportion. Writing "sales rose" when the chart shows share is a Task Achievement error, and it is a common one.

The library has no marked pie chart answer yet. The pie chart page is where one will appear.

Table

The same information as a chart, without the shape. Nothing is visually obvious, so selection is entirely on you.

The trap is transcribing the table. If the table has twenty cells and your answer has twenty numbers, you have copied rather than reported. Find the highest, the lowest, and the one that behaves differently from the rest, and build the answer on those three.

Marked answer: recycling rates by country, estimated band 7.0. More on the table page.

Process diagram

Stages of how something is made or how a natural cycle works. No numbers, no trends, and usually no dates.

Two things change. The tense is present simple, not past, because a process is always true. And the passive is normal here: the water is filtered, the clay is heated. A process described entirely in active voice with a vague subject reads oddly and costs marks on Grammatical Range.

The overview for a process says how many stages there are and where it starts and ends. That is all.

Marked answer: water treatment, estimated band 7.5. More on the process diagram page.

Map

Two maps of the same place at different times, or one map with a proposed change. The subject is location and transformation.

The trap is running out of position language. Almost every sentence needs a preposition of place, and repeating "next to" six times is exactly the sort of narrow range Lexical Resource marks down. North of, on the opposite side, adjacent to, in the south east corner.

Tenses matter here too. Past for what was there, present perfect or past passive for what has been built, and future forms if the second map is a plan.

The library has no marked map answer yet. The map page is where one will appear.

General Training Task 1 is a letter

If you are taking General Training, Task 1 is not a chart at all. You write a letter of about 150 words, and the first criterion is still Task Achievement: cover all three bullet points, and match the tone to the reader.

Tone is the part that goes wrong. A letter to a friend that opens "I am writing to express my dissatisfaction" is the right English in the wrong register, and register is marked. Three letter types come up: formal to someone you do not know, semi-formal to someone you know a little, and informal to a friend.

Marked answers sit on the General Training letters page, including a complaint about a faulty appliance at an estimated band 6.5 and a request to a manager at an estimated 7.5. Reading those two side by side shows what a band of difference looks like on the same skill.

A twenty minute plan

1. Two minutes. Read the question and decide what the main features are before writing anything.
2. One minute. Paraphrase the question as your opening sentence.
3. Two minutes. Write the overview. No numbers.
4. Twelve minutes. Two body paragraphs, grouped by what belongs together rather than by chart order.
5. Three minutes. Check tenses and check every number you quoted against the picture.

Step five catches more marks than it sounds like it should. A misread number is a Task Achievement error, and it is the only kind of error in Task 1 that a careful reader can find without knowing any grammar.

What to do today

Pick one chart type from the list above, ideally one you avoid. Write only the overview sentence, twice, for two different questions. Two sentences each time, no detail, no numbers.

Then write the full answer for the type you find hardest and check the four criteria against it one at a time. The bands on every sample above were produced by Bandly's own scoring engine and are estimates rather than examiner marks, so the useful thing is the reasoning shown beside each answer. You can put your own attempt through the same engine and compare where it puts the four numbers.