The charts give information about the proportions of boys and girls of a school who achieved high grades (A or B + ) in respective courses. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

The bar charts show the changes in the percentages of

boys

and

girls

gaining impressive grades in different

subjects

in 1996 and 2000. Humanities saw the biggest increase in the

proportion

of high-achieving

boys

, with the figure nearly doubling to 43% or so.

By comparison

, the figure for

girls

dropped by 8% to 25%. Similar changes happened to the arts, in which the percentage of

boys

who gained high scores increased significantly to 21% and the figure for

girls

decreased slightly to 25%. Languages were another course which experienced a drop in the percentage of high-achieving

girls

, down to 31%, and the

proportion

of high-achievers for

boys

remained unchanged at about 21% in

this

course. There were similar patterns in the performance in science and maths for both genders. Around

one third

Add a hyphen

one-third

show examples

of

boys

gained satisfying grades in these science courses

in

Change preposition

apply

show examples

1996-higher than the figures for other

subjects-but

Correct your spelling

subjects

show examples

only around 18% and 17% reached

this

level in 2000.

In contrast

, the

proportion

of high-achieving

girls

in these two courses increased to 11% and 15% respectively,

although

these figures were still far lower than those for the other three

subjects

.

Overall

, there were clear gender differences in all these five

subjects

: science

subjects

saw an improvement in the performance of

girls

,

while

the arts and humanities had a higher

proportion

of high-performing

boys

. In 2000,

boys

outperformed

girls

in every subject except the arts.