Pick out the main features of this pie 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 pie chart below shows the main sources of plastic waste in the oceans.
Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.
Write at least 150 words.
| Category | Share of waste |
|---|---|
| Packaging | 36% |
| Fishing gear | 18% |
| Textiles | 14% |
| Tyres | 12% |
| Other | 20% |
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
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Write your own answer first, then compare: how it answers the exact question, what each paragraph does, and which phrases you could borrow.
The pie chart shows the main sources of plastic waste in the oceans.
Overall, packaging was the biggest single source of ocean plastic, accounting for more than a third of the total. The remaining sources contributed smaller and more similar shares.
Packaging produced 36% of the waste, which was exactly twice the share of the next largest named source, fishing gear, at 18%. Together, these two sources made up 54% of ocean plastic, more than half of the total.
Textiles and tyres were the third and fourth largest sources, at 14% and 12% respectively. Their combined contribution of 26% was therefore smaller than that of packaging alone, and the two sources differed by only 2 percentage points.
The category labelled as other covered the remaining 20%, or exactly one-fifth of the total, and fishing gear accounted for nearly as much, at 18%. This was a larger share than either textiles or tyres, but it was still well below the figure for packaging. The smallest named source was tyres, which contributed only one-third as much as packaging, while textiles contributed less than half as much.
| Phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ocean plastic | plastic in the sea |
| source | where something comes from |
| account for | make up |
| twice as much | double |
| the remaining | what is left |
| contribute | add to |
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