📈 The table below gives information on consumer spending on different items in five different countries in 2002

Hi! It's Rory here. So, I am on my first Jack Daniel’s and Diet Coke of the evening and I have decided to edit this and another writing task. Let’s see how this goes…

The table below gives information on consumer spending on different items in five different countries in 2002. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

The Task

The table provided presents data on the percentage of money spent on consumer goods and services in five countries in 2002.

"What a nice opening statement. It paraphrases the task nicely to show flexible use of vocabulary. Obviously you can’t paraphrase everything but it’s a nice start. How many times did I write the word “nice” there?"

According to the table, the highest proportions of income spent on consumables were in Turkey and Ireland at just over 32% and almost 29% respectively. The percentage of spending on leisure and education was also highest in Turkey, at 4.35% while spending on clothing and footwear that year was considerably higher in Italy than in the other countries at 9%.

”According to the table” is a bit sassy, but still it’s a great reference to the table. Check out the use of commas here to mark the boundaries of clauses and ideas. I love it. Oooo and we have used the word “respectively” to join together pairs of ideas. It’s not just an adverb, it’s a referencing device. If that isn’t band 9 then I’ll eat my hat! “Consumables” is a good word but feels very American. You could just say what’s in the table."

By contrast, the lowest percentage of expenditure in the included nations for wearables was in Sweden (5.40%). While Sweden had a lower figure for that category and the lowest for food, drinks and tobacco, it had a higher expenditure on leisure and education (3.22%) unlike Spain which had the lowest at just under 2%.

"I love the phrase “by contrast” to show we are entering a new section of the text with a new theme. Always use “by/in contrast” if you can (“similarly” works for related but separate ideas). There has been a variety of phrases so far used to describe the trends: “highest”, “considerably higher”, “lowest”, etc."

Overall, it can clearly be seen that the largest proportion of spendings were made on food, drinks and tobacco whereas the lowest figures were observed in the leisure and education column. On average, Turkey seemed to have spent more money on two out of three given categories.

"Well, well, well, check out this closing statement. It’s at the end of the text (which Maria didn’t like) and it’s two sentences long (which I didn’t like, so we have cancelled each other out!). It both describes the table and it’s major trend, which is a new step for us in addition to using passive voice. What a nice (4th time for “nice”) text! All in all, I feel pretty good about it."