Band 6+: IELTS Academic Writing Task 1: You should spend about 20 minutes on this task. The graph below gives information about the percentage of the population in four Asian countries living in cities from 1970 to 2020, with predictions for 2030 and 2040. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

The line graph above presents data on percentages of the urban population in four different countries between 1970 and 2040. It is evident that there are upward trends for all of them and the figure for Malaysia shows a constant domination in the majority of the period given.

Focusing on the proportions of people living in cities in Malaysia and Philippines, making them higher than the rest of the nations, they both started at a similar number , with the figure for former was slightly lower with 30% than that of the latter, with just 1-2 % discrepancy. While the percentage of the Malaysia’s urban citizens saw a dramatical increase by 2020, there was a moderate rise in that of the Philippines’s. Moreover, a further growth is expected , reaching around 82% in the percentage of the urban population in Malaysia, whereas the figure for Philippine is estimated to climb to about 50% by 2040.

By contrast, the figures were smaller for the remaining categories in 1970. Starting at around 15%, a consistent improvement was seen in the proportion of the urban population in both Thailand and Indonesia by 2020, with sharing the same numbers in 2010. However the percentage of Indonesia’s urban residents is projected to be considerably higher, with about 60% than that of Thailand, which will be approximately at 45%.