The bar chart below shows shares of expenditures for five major categories in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan in the year 2009. Write a report for a university lecturer describing the information below.

The bar chart illustrates the expenditure percentages for five categories in five countries in 2009.

Overall

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, it is evident that housing

costed

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cost

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the most in all the countries, except for Japan.

Conversely

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, the shares of money spent on healthcare and clothing were the least. The bar chart details reveal that Americans and British spent around 27% and 24% of their total expenditure on residence, respectively.

Similarly

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, individuals in the other two countries spent slightly more than 20% on accommodation.

However

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, in Japan, the vast majority of their spending was used to buy food, with 24% of the total.

In contrast

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, the figure for the US only stood at 14%, almost half the share of the housing category. Shifting our focus to the two areas where people paid less than 10% of their total spending, American healthcare costs made up 8%, almost quadrupling the British share. For attire, around 6% of the total was spent on clothing in Canada and the UK.

Furthermore

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, the two other nations spent even less than that, with approximately 5% and 4% in the US and Japan, respectively.