The pie charts below show the average household expenditures in Japan and Malaysia in

the year 2010.

Summarize the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons
where relevant.

The pie charts illustrate how the typical household allocated their budgets in Japan and Malaysia
in 2010. Overall, the bulk of average household expenditures were on housing, food, and other
nonspecific goods and services in both countries, while the opposite was the case for health
care.
1. The summary is okay but not great. The purpose of the overall summary read some sort
overall idea of what data represents. You’ve told me the three highest, which is a lot, and
possibly too many to give me accurate picture…. Then you told me healthcare is the
opposite…. Nothing is mentioned about transport. If you going to mention so many of
these categories I would mention them all…. What you could do is tell me categories that
are higher and lower in Malaysia than Japan. “Overall Malaysians spend a higher
proportion on X, Y, and Z and a lower proportion on A and B”…. If you wrote this then
this could be the structure for the body of the essay with paragraph 2 containing the
higher categories and paragraph 3 containing the lower categories. Another option could
be to just tell me what the highest and lowest category after each country [this is not so
great for this particular task]

In Japan, the average household distributed 29% of its funds on other commodities and services,
closely followed by food with 24% and then housing which accounted for 21%. At 1% lower,
transport registered one-fifth of the total spending, which was almost 4 times larger than that of
healthcare with only 6%.
1. You could highlight that when you’re giving the 29% this is the highest… This will [1]
let me know this is the highest [2] indicate that the paragraph is structured from highest
to lowest [you do this well in the next paragraph]

As for Malaysia, housing occupied 34%, which was the largest proportion of average household
expenditures. The second and third highest percentages were found in food-related bills and
other products and services, with 27% and 26%, respectively. The two smallest shares
proportions were in for transport with 10%, and in health care with just 3%.
1. This sentence is improved with the relative pronoun which [I like to see it there and it’s helpful
for your score for grammar. I think it’s still grammatically correct without the relative pronoun.
Overall the problem with a really simple easy task like this is that you need to show me some talent to
get to high scores. In a way it’s unlucky to get such an easy task because it’s hard to show talent. I can’t
really see a lot of talent with things such as the overall summary. However, you have shown me talent
with vocabulary

Task Achieve- 7-8 150 -190 words

ment
overall summary
I feel this could be better
all key data covered / data is highlighted well
this could be better in paragraph 2
data is reported accurately

Cohesion and 8 logical separation of data into paragraphs

Coherence
body paragraphs start with a phrase that indicates the data in the paragraph

logical paragraph development

linking phrases are used well

Vocabulary 8 ✘
appropriate word choices / control of word endings/forms

spelling is correct

Grammar 8 articles (a, an, the)

✘
sentence structures are correct

Overall 7.5-8 This is a really simple task and that makes it difficult to show talent. I guess that’s
worth thinking about because it could happen in the test. This task is easy to
complete but not easy to get a high score!