IELTS Task 1: The tables below give information about sales of Fairtrade labelled coffee and bananas

a brand of coffee and bananas sold in Europe

Question:

The tables below give information about sales of Fairtrade*-labelled coffee and bananas in 1999 and 2004 in five European countries.
Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

Answer:

The two tables provide the data about coffee and bananas sales in 1999 and in 2004 in millions of euros for five countries in Europe.

According to the first table, UK had the biggest increase for coffee from 1999 to 2004 among the five given countries. The sales of coffee in UK in 1999 was 1.5 million euros and the amount increased to 20 million euros in 2000. The sales amount of Switzerland had been doubled in these five years( from 3 to 6 million). In Belgium, coffee sales in 2004 was 1.7 million euros whereas 1 million euros in 1999. There was a small increase of coffee sales in Denmark and in Sweden between these years.

For bananas, Switzerland had highest demand for both these years and the demand had been up more than 3 times (15 in 1999 and 47 in 2004).UK had a huge growth of sales of bananas (5.5 times). In 1999, Belgium had only 0.6 million euros but it eventually reached to 4 million. But for other two countries, Sweden and Denmark, the sales amounts were downward and the demands became almost half in 2004 as compare to that of in 1999.

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Suggestions
between these years => in the span of 5 years

has been up => has soared

for the other two countries => On the contrary

Remember in IELTS, vocabulary counts and in task 1 they are not concerned about the facts and figures you provide but rather on how you analyze the facts and deduce logical reasons and relations.

Thanks a lot for your suggestions

Falu, you have written way too many words for the allotted 20 minutes in this essay. Aim to write no more than 175 -200 words in order to allow yourself ample time to review, revise, and edit the content of your essay. While vocabulary counts in an IELTS essay test, reading and comprehension skills are what account for 50% of your actual score. So focusing in only one aspect of the scoring technique, which is only a low part of the scoring consideration will not help you much. A long essay will never qualify you for a passing score, regardless of vocabulary, if you prove you cannot follow simple English instructions.

I believe that your summarization of the given information is accurate and shows a clear understanding of the prompt requirements, You gave comparisons of information from both tables, which is the most analysis that can be done for such a situation since your analysis is only as good and complete as the information you have been provided in the charts. Thee were no similar figures in any instance so I did not expect to find anything other than a report of the main features in a comparison format. You approached this essay from the proper perspective. You did a good job.

That said, your essay does not have a specific trending statement indicated such as a consecutive increase or decrease in sales over the comparison period. I would have indicated an increasing trend for bananas, specifically in Switzerland and a an increase in coffee specifically in the UK over the given time frames. Aside from that missing statement, you have pretty much complete information. However, you should have presented a 4 paragraph format since this is a task 1 essay. The trending statement could have represented the 4th paragraph, placed anywhere within the page.

Thank you very much for your in detail feedback. It was really helpful.