IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 - How to describe and compare numbers

hi I'm Dennis with best my test comm and welcome to our IELTS academic writing video series in this first video today we're going to talk about how to talk about numbers in academic writing task 1 you're gonna have to interpret data that you're going to see in bar charts pie charts line graphs so we're going to give you today some different ways that you can talk about numbers and percentages so that you can vary your vocabulary and score higher okay so let's get started okay so in today's video we're not going to write an entire essay together we're gonna focus on vocabulary to help you describe the number and the numbers and the data in the chart so a typical question is there you're gonna see a chart like this one right here and the the test is going to ask you to summarize the chart in at least 150 words okay so our example chart here we've got male and female and we have three different subjects over here so these this chart describes the differences between men and women and different subjects at the University of Cambridge in 2001 now suppose suppose you wanted to talk about you wanted to describe how many male students were studying philosophy at Cambridge in 2001 right so most students are gonna say something really simple really basic there were 50 students studying philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 2001 right 50 students and that's correct there's nothing wrong with that but it's basic and if you want to level up your score you want to use more diverse vocabulary so let me give you some examples of that now okay so the first one you can say the number of right you can say the number of male students studying philosophy at University of Cambridge in 2001 stood at 50 you can say that you could also change this you could just you could say was as well you can say the number of students was 50 that's okay too but stood is a higher level that's what you want to go for okay so another one using the number of you can say the number of male students studying philosophy at University of Cambridge in 2001 totaled 50 or the same beginning of that sentence and you can add amounted to 50 right so we're talking about the same thing we're using describing the same data but we're using different ways to do that and that diversity of vocabulary and sentence pattern is going to set you apart and help you score higher let's continue so next one male students studying philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 2001 numbered 50 so you can use number as a verb as well the now numbered and then you put the number there okay last one the figure for male students studying philosophy at University of Cambridge in 2001 amounted to 50 or again totaled 50 right so these were using the same two here and you can use them in there as well so one thing to note is here this word the figure right so figure has a few different meanings it can mean shape but here it means a number it's another way to say a number it's another word for number okay so one thing to really pay attention to as you know by now prepositions are really tricky in English and so here the figure for male students make sure you remember that preposition for the figure for male students and I want to I want to show you one other thing so there's a very useful word and it's the proportion right proportion now this word is really high vocabulary and if you can use it well it's going to demonstrate your your knowledge of English so but the thing about proportions we don't use exact numbers we don't say the proportion is 42 or the proportion is 68 you talk about it in comparison to something else so right here like look we got philosophy we have male students about 50 and philosophy women it's about 150 so to use proportion here we would say the proportion of male students was one-third that of female students or to flip the sentence around the number of female students was three times as high as male students so proportion is a great word to use but just remember it's in comparison to something either a different thing or the same thing at a different time as in before or after okay so those are some sentence patterns that you can use in vocabulary that you can use to describe different numbers in a bar chart okay so as you know IELTS academic writing task one is all about looking at charts and describing the data that you see and a big part of that is going to be comparing numbers so now what I want to help you do is learn how to talk about numbers in general so that you can use different sentence patterns and higher-level vocabulary to do that okay let's go through some different vocabulary and sentence patterns now for these these sentence them that I'm about to show you imagine that you're looking at a graph and the graph is describing how many people take taxis versus public transport those are going to be the two things that we compare all right so have a look so first one overall more people preferred public transport than taxis okay so the basic pattern here is more noun verb noun than noun right so more people preferred public transport van taxis more dogs prefer bacon than chicken more men prefer basketball dance-off pretty straightforward pretty basic all right moving on over all taxis were more popular than public transport okay so pretty similar you have noun were more popular than [Music] noun right so pretty simple pretty similar overall taxis were more popular than public transport overall bacon was bacon was more popular than chicken all right so these are good sentences to have they're pretty basic level so to really get a higher score you want to focus on these sentence patterns okay let's look at the third sentence overall a higher number of people preferred public transport van taxis okay or you could say a higher proportion of people preferred public transport than taxis now if you notice it's very similar to this pattern over here more people preferred public transport than taxis the only real difference is that you're changing this word more into a higher number of or a higher proportion of and just that little shift like that is going to take your vocabulary level up that much higher let's move on overall the proportion of people taking public transport exceeds those taking taxis so now we're moving out of that basic more than comparison right now we're talking about we're using the words exceeds or is higher than or Dwarfs if you can get this work Dwarfs or this words exceeds into your into your answer that's a really high level of vocabulary and so here we say overall the proportion of and the same way here we say a higher number of you can do that here too you can say the number of you can say the number of people taking public transport is higher than those taking taxis that works as well okay final one overall people taking public transport out numbers those taking taxis and this is this is again a much higher vocabulary vocabulary word than the rest and if you if you notice it it's really a difference between linking verbs and action verbs outnumbers Dwarfs exceeds these are better these are higher-level vocabulary because they're action verbs are not linking verbs okay let's talk about opposites when you're comparing two things you can often switch the subject in the predicate if you change what's in the middle let me show you what I mean so overall more people prefer public transport we can also say overall fewer people fewer people preferred and now we change this to taxis than public transport right so we change some words in the sentence but it means the same thing the the meaning of the sentence is the same so more we change the fewer now here we can do the same thing we can just say less popular right the noun was less popular than the other noun right over here overall a lower number of people prefer public transport or we can say a lower proportion of people preferred taxis than public transport and here we can say overall the proportion of people taking public transport exceeds so we can change that to surrenders to we could change this to is lower than or is smaller than it's going to depend the context of the data on the graph and here we can say change Dwarfs to falls short of right so the the again these words fall short of surrenders - these are the higher-level words because their action words they're very descriptive in in the way they're written more numbers so now we're going to continue talking you sample this is an example chart we got here this is chocolate bars sold in South Africa and it's by millions of bars and it goes from zero to fifty million bars and at the bottom here we got name brands of bars we have Mars bar Snickers lint crunchy and KitKat and these are all you know famous brands of chocolate bars and how much they've sold so I'm going to go over some sentence patterns to describe how to talk about these numbers in multiples of each other now for all of these sentences I'm talking about Snickers and Mars and as you can see Snickers sold 20 million and Mars sold 10 million right so that's an exact multiple Snickers sold twice as many as Mars let me show you how that works so first off and this is probably the most basic one Snickers sold 2 times as many chocolate bars as Mars right really basic really simple Snickers sold 2 times as many as Mars that's important right this this as many as is very important for that let's move on to the next one it's almost the same except we're using a higher level of vocabulary where we're using here twice and as you know twice means two times alright so Snickers so twice as many chocolate bars as Mars now here's a here's a caveat twice we have we can say one time we can say two times right or we can say once and we can say twice and these are higher level vocabulary words but there's no word well there's a word for three times we say thrice except people stop saying that a hundred years ago we don't really use that word anymore so if you're gonna say two times you can say twice if you're gonna say one time you can say once but after that you've got to say five times ten times a hundred times okay let's move on so these are these are basic these are simple grammatically correct you can use them but again if you want to score higher you want to spade spend more time to sing these sentence patterns okay Snickers sold double the number of chocolate bars in comparison to Mars right so same we're talking about the same data in a different way snick sneakers will double the number of in comparison to Mars you could also say as Mars double the number of chocolate bars as Mars it's a little simpler or you can say as compared to Mars right so those are all the same they mean the same thing just a little bit of variation if you if you vary your vocabulary that's going to display how well you can you can use English so again so double the same way twice right we've only got two words for twice we've got a few more words for double or that kind of word right so we have a double triple quadruple kin couple that's five and in there sextuple and septuple but those are very uncommon words we don't really use those those much so if you're going to get past five then you're going to want to say five times rather than try to say kin tupple or six temple okay so moving on snickers sold more chocolate bars by a ratio of two to one oh and i should add here than mars right so you need to compare two things than mars and so again so now we're two to one right that's a ratio of two to one now you can change this to four to one five to one 162,000 to one you can put any number in here and you could put any any number in here but it's going to get complicated the most common way we talked about this is two two one three two one five two one okay last one the number of chocolate bars Snickers sold outnumbered the total amount of chocolate bars Mars sold by a ratio of two to one now as you can see already this isn't a longer sentence it's a more elaborate sentence so the number you have to say the number of chocolate bars Snickers sold and you say chocolate bars Marcille you have to say that chocolate bars Snickers sold chocolate bars Marcille you have to say that twice and again by a ratio of 2 to 1 now here you can say 3 2 1 5 2 1 6 2 1 the same as in up here ok I want to add one more here and like I was saying before if you can use action verbs I mean in writing and speaking that's just gonna level up your English so let me give you a really great one you can say out sold right so this sentence is longer than the rest let's make it a lot simpler mara Snickers Snickers outsold Mars right Snickers outsold Mars and then again by a ratio of 2 to 1 then you add that bit at the end but if you use outsold that's a very very high level word that's a very good vocabulary word to use okay so I want to point out something so that you can see it so that you can avoid it it's a common mistake people make so when we're comparing things we compare 1 noun to a second now that's what we're doing so here we say Snickers so double the number of chocolate bars in comparison to Mars that's a good sentence that makes sense but I want to show you something we could also change this to twice the number of chocolate bars or we could say 5 times the number of chocolate bars that's okay we can say that but we've got to make one crucial you long as I get that as in there I'm good make sense okay that's the end of today's video just a quick recap we talked about numbers on the IELTS academic writing task 1 and how to compare those numbers we also talked about how to describe them in general and we talked about how to just how to compare multiples of something and remember if you can master that higher-level vocabulary that's going to help you reach a higher score so next video we're going to talk about percentages and how to talk about percent versus percentage and what that means so I'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: BestMyTest

Views: 29,593

Keywords: yt:cc=on, BestMyTest, IELTS writing, IELTS Academic writing, IELTS writing vocabulary

Id: 7JBcZekNcV0

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020