Average Daily Commute Times in Four Cities · 2010 vs 2025
A complete IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 question with a model answer of 198 words, plus a breakdown of the sentence structures, cohesive devices and vocabulary that answer uses. Write your own version first, then compare.
Written by Manish Sharma · CELTA and DELTA qualified · 8 years teaching IELTS
Score my answer to this questionThe question
You have 20 minutes. Write at least 150 words.
The table below shows the average one-way daily commute times, in minutes, for residents of four major cities — London, Sydney, Mumbai and Toronto — in 2010 and 2025. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words. [Table — Average one-way daily commute time, in minutes] City | 2010 | 2025 London | 42 | 49 Sydney | 36 | 41 Mumbai | 51 | 58 Toronto | 34 | 44
How to approach it
- 01Group cities by category (highest/lowest, biggest change/smallest change) before describing each one separately
- 02Use both absolute differences ('rose by 7 minutes') and proportional language ('roughly 17 per cent') for variety
- 03Highlight any change in ranking — Toronto overtaking Sydney is the kind of detail that lifts Task Achievement
- 04Write a strong overview that captures the universal upward trend and the city with the steepest rise
- 05Use comparative structures rather than reading the table row by row
Model answer
198 words in 4 paragraphs. Read it after you have written your own, not before: the point of a model answer is to show you what you missed, and you cannot miss anything you have not attempted.
The table compares the average one-way daily commute times, measured in minutes, in four major cities — London, Sydney, Mumbai and Toronto — in 2010 and 2025.
Overall, commute times lengthened in every city across the fifteen-year period, with Mumbai recording the longest journeys in both years and Toronto experiencing the steepest proportional increase. No city showed any improvement in travel time.
Grouping the cities by absolute travel time, Mumbai and London occupied the upper end of the scale. Commuters in Mumbai already faced the longest journey to work in 2010 at 51 minutes, and this rose by a further seven minutes to 58 minutes by 2025. London followed a similar pattern, climbing from 42 to 49 minutes over the same period — a rise of roughly 17 per cent.
Sydney and Toronto, by contrast, started from a lower base but converged on the leaders. Sydney's commute extended modestly from 36 to 41 minutes, the smallest absolute and proportional change in the table. Toronto, however, saw its average journey time jump from 34 to 44 minutes, a gain of around 29 per cent — the sharpest rise of any city and one that pushed Canadian commuters past their Australian counterparts by 2025.
What this answer actually does
Measured from the text above, and compared against the other 38 answers of the same type in this library. These are counts, not band scores: they describe what the writing does, which is the part you can copy.
9.5 fewer than the median answer for this task type
8 words at the shortest, 38 at the longest
2 fewer than the median answer for this task type
carry a subordinate or relative clause
Sentence rhythm
Sentences average 22 words and vary by 8.2 words either side of that, running from 8 words to 38. Variation is the point. Grammatical Range and Accuracy rewards a mix of simple and complex sentences, and an answer where every sentence is the same length reads as flat no matter how correct it is. 1 of the 9 sentences here carry a subordinate or relative clause.
The cohesive devices it uses
3 in total, spread across 2 different functions. Range matters more than count: an answer that opens every paragraph with a sequencer signals its structure but never signals a relationship between ideas, and Coherence and Cohesion is marked on both.
by contrast, however
overall
Vocabulary and repetition
Ignoring grammar words, 71 per cent of the content words in this answer are distinct, and 53 per cent appear exactly once. Lexical Resource is where repetition costs the most marks, and the usual cause is not a small vocabulary but reaching for the same noun every time the topic is named.
The longest run of words copied straight from the question is 12 words. That is long enough to notice. Copied wording is discounted from your word count, so a run this size is doing less work than it looks like it is doing.
What you are marked on
All four criteria carry equal weight, and your Writing band is their average rounded to the nearest half band.
Task Achievement
Cover the main trends and meaningful comparisons across both years, with a clear overview
Coherence & Cohesion
Group cities logically (e.g. by magnitude of change) rather than listing them in isolation
Lexical Resource
Range of comparative and proportional vocabulary applied accurately
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
Accurate use of past tenses, comparatives and complex sentences across the two time points
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