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 how volunteers divided their time between types of organisation in one city.
Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.
Write at least 150 words.
| Category | Share of hours |
|---|---|
| Charity | 30% |
| Education | 24% |
| Environment | 18% |
| Health | 17% |
| Sport | 11% |
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 pie chart shows how volunteers in one city divided their time between five types of organisation.
Overall, charities and educational organisations took the largest shares of volunteer hours, while sport received the smallest. The other three categories were fairly close to one another.
Charities received the biggest share of volunteer time, at 30%, followed by education with 24%. Together, these two categories accounted for 54% of all hours, which was more than half of the total.
Environmental organisations and health organisations attracted similar amounts of volunteer time. Environmental work accounted for 18% of hours, while health accounted for 17%, a difference of only 1 percentage point. Combined, these two categories made up 35%, which was slightly more than the share of charities alone.
Sport was the least popular area for volunteering, with just 11% of hours. This was about one-third of the charity figure and less than half of the education figure. In other words, volunteers devoted almost three times as many hours to charities as they did to sports organisations.
| Phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| volunteer hours | unpaid time given |
| type of organisation | kind of group |
| the largest share | the biggest part |
| over half | more than 50% |
| attract | get interest |
| the least | the smallest |
Answer random Part 1, 2 and 3 questions on an exam timer.
Average your four skill bands, rounded the way IELTS rounds them.
Compare an IELTS band with TOEFL, Duolingo and PTE scores and CEFR levels.
Look up the IELTS score a university asks for, with the source.