1. Understand the task
Use this original Academic Task 1 practice to work on comparing proportions and separating shares from absolute totals. Write at least 150 words and allow about 20 minutes for the whole task. These length and timing points follow official IELTS Writing format guidance.
Original practice task
How a student budget is divided
The pie charts show how a typical monthly student budget was divided among four categories in the fictional town of Westhaven in 2015 and 2025. Describe the main features and make relevant comparisons. The charts give proportions only; total monthly expenditure is not provided. Write at least 150 words.
| Category | 2015 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Rent | 40% | 50% |
| Food | 25% | 20% |
| Transport | 15% | 10% |
| Other | 20% | 20% |
Allow about 20 minutes including planning and checking. This timer counts up and does not submit your writing.
2. Make a focused plan
Read a pie chart as a whole before describing its slices. All categories in one chart should add to 100%. Here they do: 40 + 25 + 15 + 20 in 2015, and 50 + 20 + 10 + 20 in 2025. This check prevents a report from treating a share as an independent count.
- Find the dominant share. Rent is the largest category in both years, rising from two fifths to half.
- Look for movement in opposite directions. The extra ten percentage points for rent are balanced by five-point falls in both food and transport.
- Notice unchanged and tied categories. Other spending stays at 20%. Food and other spending are equal in 2025.
- Choose a combined comparison. Food and transport together drop from 40% to 30%. They equal rent initially but fall well below it later.
An overview should convey the greater prominence of rent, the smaller shares of food and transport, and the unchanged remainder. Avoid saying that students paid more rent in cash. A larger share of a smaller total can still represent a lower amount of money. Without the total budget, the direction of actual spending remains unknown.
Write your own response
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3. Compare the annotated model
Write first, then compare choices rather than memorising phrases. This original model is an instructional example, not an examiner-marked response; no band score is claimed.
Read the model and paragraph notes
The two pie charts compare the proportions of a typical student’s monthly budget allocated to rent, food, transport and other expenses in Westhaven in 2015 and 2025. They show the distribution of spending rather than monetary amounts.
Overall, rent took the largest share in both years and became more dominant in 2025. Food and transport accounted for smaller proportions by the end of the period, whereas the share assigned to other expenses remained unchanged.
In 2015, rent represented 40% of the budget, making it equal to food and transport combined. Food alone accounted for a quarter, while transport made up 15%. The remaining fifth was allocated to other expenses, a larger proportion than transport but a smaller one than food.
Ten years later, rent absorbed exactly half of the budget, an increase of ten percentage points. The food share fell from 25% to 20%, bringing it level with other expenses. Transport declined by five percentage points to 10% and remained the smallest category. Together, food and transport represented 30% in 2025, twenty percentage points below rent. Although these changes show a different balance between categories, the charts do not establish whether the amount spent in any category rose or fell.
Why this response is organised this way
- The introduction names the four categories and makes the unit explicit, preventing later confusion about currency.
- The overview selects dominance and direction rather than repeating all eight figures.
- The first detail paragraph uses a combined share and two comparisons to organise the earlier chart.
- The final paragraph compares both dates and identifies the new tie. The last sentence is useful for this particular practice; it is not a required ending for every pie-chart report.
4. Practise a precise revision
Repair the following three claims. Write one corrected sentence for each before revealing the answer. For the third claim, use a numerical counterexample to show why it cannot be established from the charts.
- Rent increased by 10% between the two years.
- In 2025, food was twice as much as transport.
- Students definitely spent more money on rent in 2025.
Check the repairs and the counterexample
1: “Rent’s share increased by ten percentage points, from 40% to 50%.” The relative increase in the share is 25%, because 10 divided by 40 is 0.25. Use percentage points for the direct subtraction.
2: “The share allocated to food was twice the share allocated to transport in 2025.” Since both are parts of the same monthly total, the corresponding food expenditure would also be twice transport expenditure within that year. Naming the shares keeps the description aligned with the chart.
3: The claim is unsupported. Imagine a budget of 1,000 units in 2015 and 700 in 2025. Rent would be 400 and 350 respectively despite its larger share. These invented totals are a reasoning exercise, not additional chart data, so do not insert them into the report.
5. Review and try again
Circle each percentage in your draft and check that its category and year are unambiguous. A sentence such as “It fell to 20%” may be difficult to interpret if the previous sentence mentions several categories. Repeat a category name when a pronoun would create confusion.
Now write a two-sentence overview without numbers. Then add a separate detail sentence comparing rent with food and transport combined. This separation helps you practise the difference between a broad summary and supporting evidence. On a later attempt, swap fractions such as “a quarter” for numerical percentages where appropriate, but retain numerical precision whenever rounding would change the comparison.
Format checked on 15 October 2026 against IELTS Writing format. Task, model, visual material and practice explanations are original. This independent lesson is not an official IELTS test.