IELTS writing practice 6: bar chart and a Task 2 essay

The chart below shows the average number of hours per week that adults in Northgate spent on five leisure activities in 2005 and 2025. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

The bar chart compares how many hours a week, on average, adults in Northgate spent on five leisure activities in 2005 and in 2025.

Overall, the most striking change was the shift from television to online media, which replaced it as the most popular pastime. Although the total time spent on these five activities stayed the same, at 37 hours a week, most offline activities lost ground.

In 2005, watching television was by far the most common activity, at 18 hours a week, while online video and social media accounted for just 2 hours. Twenty years later, the picture had changed dramatically. Television viewing had halved to 9 hours, whereas online media had risen sevenfold to 14 hours, making it the leading activity.

Among the other activities, time spent seeing friends in person fell from 8 hours to 6, and reading declined from 5 hours to 3. Sport and exercise was the only offline activity to increase, although only slightly, from 4 to 5 hours a week.

Taken together, screen-based activities rose from 20 to 23 hours a week, so by 2025 they made up about three fifths of adults' leisure time.

In many countries, people now throw away and replace items such as phones, clothes and household appliances instead of repairing them. Why is this happening? What can be done to encourage people to repair things?

In many parts of the world, a broken phone, a torn jacket or a faulty kettle is now more likely to end up in the bin than at a repair shop. This essay will explain the main reasons for this trend and suggest how governments, manufacturers and individuals could make repair more common.

The most important reason is cost. Mass production has made many new goods remarkably cheap, while repairs depend on skilled labour, which is expensive. When fixing a toaster costs almost as much as buying a new one, most people understandably choose the replacement. A second reason is design. Many modern products are glued or sealed together, spare parts can be hard to obtain, and some manufacturers allow only their own approved technicians to carry out repairs. Finally, attitudes have changed. Advertising constantly encourages people to upgrade, so a phone that still works can feel out of date after only two or three years, and fewer people today have the practical skills their grandparents used to mend clothes or simple machines.

Several measures could reverse this trend. Governments could require manufacturers to make spare parts and repair manuals available for a minimum number of years, and to design products that can be opened and fixed with ordinary tools. Reducing taxes on repair services would also make mending things more affordable than replacing them. At a local level, councils and community groups can run free repair workshops, where volunteers fix items and teach basic skills such as sewing and replacing a phone screen. Clear labels showing how repairable a product is would also help shoppers make better choices.

In conclusion, people replace rather than repair mainly because new goods are cheap, products are hard to fix and consumer attitudes have shifted. Making repair easier, cheaper and more socially valued through regulation, tax changes and community programs could reduce waste and save households money.