Pick out the main features of this bar chart for your overview, write your report on a 20-minute timer, then compare it with a band-8 model answer.
You should spend about 20 minutes on this task.
The chart below shows the average time men and women spent on five leisure activities at weekends.
Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.
Write at least 150 words.
| Category | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| TV | 3.2 | 2.9 |
| Sport | 2 | 0.9 |
| Reading | 0.5 | 1.4 |
| Socialising | 1.8 | 2.6 |
| Gaming | 2.1 | 0.6 |
GoPrep wrote this practice question in the style of the exam. It is not an official IELTS question.
An overview names the main trends or differences in one or two sentences, without numbers. These are the features a strong answer picks out:
Spend the first few minutes planning, then write.
0 words of 150 minimum
Your answer stays on this page only. Copy it before you leave.
Write your own answer first, then compare: how it answers the exact question, what each paragraph does, and which phrases you could borrow.
The bar chart compares the average time, in hours, that men and women spent on five leisure activities at weekends.
Overall, television was the most popular activity for both sexes, but men spent more time on sport and gaming, whereas women devoted more time to socialising and reading.
Television viewing took up the most time for both groups, at 3.2 hours for men and 2.9 hours for women, so the difference between them was small. Socialising was the second most time-consuming activity for women, at 2.6 hours, compared with 1.8 hours for men.
Men showed a clear preference for more active or competitive pastimes. They spent 2 hours on sport, more than double the 0.9 hours recorded by women, and 2.1 hours on gaming, which was around three and a half times the women's figure of 0.6 hours. In fact, gaming was the second most popular activity among men.
Reading was the least popular activity for men, at just 0.5 hours, whereas women read for 1.4 hours, almost three times as long. Women's lowest figure, by contrast, was for gaming at 0.6 hours.
| Phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| leisure activities | things people do in free time |
| spend time on | use hours doing something |
| more than double | over twice as much |
| the most popular | chosen by the most people |
| devote X hours to | give time to something |
| by contrast | in contrast |
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