IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 - Vocabulary for Pie charts (Describe percentages)

hi I'm Dennis with best my test comm today we're gonna talk about continue talking about IELTS academic writing task 1 well today we're gonna talk about percentages now when you see a pie chart usually that's gonna you're going to see percentages and a lot of students get confused about this they don't know exactly the right way to talk about percentages so what I want to do today is I want to tell you very clearly how do we talk about percentages and I also want to give you some options so that you can diversify your vocabulary and score the best that you can all right let's get started okay let's talk about it here we got an example chart here and as you can see this pie chart depicts the energy generation by fuel type in the UK in the year 2014 nuclear power gas renewables oil and coal okay so I'm going to show you some patterns that you can use to describe that but before I do I want to tell you something that applies to all of them and it's about how you say how do you write percent now there's three different ways you can do it you can say percent as one word you can say per cent as two words or you can just write the symbol like that all three are perfectly acceptable and so Jay I don't know if you know this but percent means per one's at 100 right it's a Latin word cent as a Latin comes from a Latin word so percent means per 100 all right let's get into the sentence patterns so the first one energy produced by oil accounted for 4% of the total energy in 2014 right pretty straightforward oil 4% straightforward accounted for 4% next one energy produced by renewables made up 15% of the total energy in 2014 right I'm talking about the percentage and I'm just using a different different vocabulary for that I can change this energy produced by oil made up 4% of the total energy that's okay too next one energy produced by nuclear power constituted twenty two point five percent of the total energy in 2014 that's constituted 22.5% same thing you can plug in any of these numbers into these patterns constituted made up accounted for now here's something that you might want to look out this dot right some people say 22.5 whatever you do don't say 22.5 twenty two point five okay point five point seven point six point whatever alright next energy produced by coal comprised twenty eight point four percent of the total energy in 2014 again same thing you can use comprised up here energy produced by a little comprised four percent of the total energy in 2014 you can swap them around no problem last one gas accounted for thirty point one percent of the energy production in 2014 so yeah as you notice this is the same pattern up here but we're just showing that you can change what comes after it right you don't have to just save the total energy in 2014 there's ways that you can vary what comes after it as well and that that diversification of of your vocabulary is going to demonstrate your ability to use the English language okay so let's move on now we're going to talk about how do you compare two percentages or talk about to two percentages in one sentence let's look at a couple sentence patterns okay so first off let's look at this word comprised comprises a really high level of vocabulary word if you can find an appropriate place to use it and you can use it correctly do it comprised means to be made up of so energy production in the UK comprised energy production in the UK is made up of means the same thing energy production in the UK comprised four percent oil fifteen percent renewables 22.5% nuclear power twenty eight point four percent coal and thirty point one percent gas in 2014 so I just did in one sentence I described the entire chart in a really in a really concise way okay now perhaps you just want to talk about two percentages in one sentence or maybe three so there's a special word that you can use to do that and that's called that's respectively so in 2014 coal and gas accounted for twenty eight point four percent and thirty point one percent of energy production in the UK respectively so this respectively means that these two numbers account for the two nouns that preceded it so it went cold and gas and so that means coal is 28.4 and gas is thirty point one okay so respectively allows you to talk about two distinct percentages in one sentence but what if you wanted to combine them well this is how you would do that you combine these two numbers and that is what is that 58.5% and then here you change respectively you would change that to collective lead right in 2014 coal and gas accounted for fifty eight point five percent of energy production in the UK collectively and that collectively is just a way to let us know that those two percentages have been added together so now you've got a way to talk about them separately and together and if you can use that that's going to help your score alright let's move on now a lot so we talked about percent right five percent twenty percent twenty six point four percent that's important to be able to talk about that but some students make the mistake of talking about percentage and they use it in the wrong wrong context so here's a way to remember it every time you say percent it must have a number that comes for it 25% 27.4% percent must always be preceded by a number now percentage is how you can kind of talk about a portion of something that's separate from the number let me show you what I mean so the percentage of energy produced right so the graph the chart is all about energy produced and the percentage of energy produced by oil okay the percentage of energy produced by oil I'm talking about that section right there was 4% in the UK in 2014 so that's just one way to kind of separate the number from percent right four percent becomes the percentage was four percent means the same thing right so there's two ways to talk about percent there but percentage you can use in them in a much in a different way you can use it in in more more ways than that so let's look at an example here so here this sentence is going to talk about the entire chart it's a way to describe the entire chart in a in a concise way the chart illustrates the percentage of electricity generated by fuel type in the UK in 2014 so that's now we know exactly what the charts about without like going through and naming every the exact amount for every percent as we did in this first example so that's another way that you can use percent percentage sorry that's another way you can use percentage okay so now I want to talk show you how to use percentage to talk about a piece of a whole and it's important for you know that we're not talking about exact numbers we're not talking about four percent we're talking about small percentage or large percentage let me show you what I mean on the board here I got a sentence with two blanks and the first one you add the piece of the hole so you can put renewables in here you can put nuclear power so let's take all for example as we already talked about you could say energy produced by oil accounted for 4% of the total energy in 2014 we were talked about that you can do that but if you wanted to add some diversity to how you're writing about this then you can say energy produced by oil accounted for a small percentage of the total energy in 2014 right it's a way to vary how you're using these these terms how you talking about this chart now obviously if it's cold you're not going to say smallest percentage you're going to say large percentage so you have to you have to think about what the small piece is in relation to the whole is it small or is it big now also on top of that you can say percentage right a small percentage but you could also say a small fraction you can also say a large segment they mean the same thing in this case they mean the same thing in this case so that's another way that you can produce percentage now if you wanted to do something else you could even use this to compare two things you can add Vann and you can put the second piece they're energy produced by oil accounted for a smaller percentage of the total energy in 2014 than coal for example so in that way you can really take it up and make this sentence a comparative sentence by changing this to ER and adding van and your second piece there okay if you haven't picked up the message that I'm trying to put down it's that if you vary your vocabulary you're gonna score higher right so now what I want to do is I want to show you a different way to talk about percentages okay so here's here's the percentage and here's what you would say okay so 10% you can say one in ten and then one in tenth and then you need to put a noun right here one in ten people one in ten schools one in ten countries now if it's 20 percent you can say two and ten if it's 50 percent you can say five and ten if it's 70 percent you can say seven and ten okay just make sure you put a noun afterwards and then moving on so 20% we also say 1/5 1/5 make sure you get that 1/5 25% you can say a quarter or 1/4 so again if it's 50% you know we can say you could say 2/4 it would be a little strange so you'd really say half if it's 75% you're gonna say 3/4 33% that's 1/3 40% 2/5 also you can say 4 and 10 50 percent is half 60% is 3/5 or 6 and 10 both are okay 80% is 4/5 90% is 9 in 10 okay so that's that's how you can use you can use words to talk about percentages in a different way now here 1 and 10 and then noun right so for the rest of these you got add of a third of and then you put a noun a third of noun a third of energy production a fifth of air pollution for example make sure you put of and then a noun so don't want to give you one more really useful vocabulary and that means to be halved now when some things have it's dropped by 50% it's cut in half so you can say right is halved was have to wear have are have you just conjugate to be into the proper form and then you had have okay now let's look at some examples so we got our words here are percentages in our words here first example according to the pie chart and we don't have a pie chart right just an example sentence how much what what percentage of imports came from India now we want a word that means 75% right and so 75% is 3/4 so we can say according to the pie chart chart 3/4 of and we got that I've already there of imports came from India next one oil accounted or what percent of electricity production so we want some that means 80% so here can we say 8 and 10 can I say 8 and 10 of electricity production and you can't and that's another thing about this one in 10 7 and 10 6 and 10 you can only use with countable nouns you can only use with countable nouns and enter electricity production is not countable so we can't say 8 and 10 but we can say 4/5 so oil accounted for four-fifths of electricity production boom all right production of TVs in the period between 2012 and 2014 and we want to drop by 50% okay to be halved but we've got to conjugate the verb so production of TVs that's the subject of the sentence so to be we need to say that production is it right are you he she it we they it's it so it draw it we say wha was halved was halved in the period between 2012 and 2014 so for this one when you're conjugating to be you got to make sure you know what the subject is and your subjects always I or you he she it we are they it's always one of those all right so now people prefer to take the bus so now 10% okay 10% one in 10 okay is people accountable now it is so this is a safe place to use one in 10 one in 10 people prefer to take the bus and that's some example sentences of how you can use these words to vary your vocabulary okay so we just talked about how to talk about these common fractions that we use in everyday speech but what about if something's not quite those round numbers that we often use well let me show you how to talk about those so 12% it's not 1 in 10 but it is slightly more than 1 in 10 right so if you just add a modifier slightly more than 1 in 10 that could be 12 percent sure it's not an exact number and that's okay you could also say slightly less than 1 in 10 if it's like 9 percent all right so you can change more to less no problem so 4 here for 15% that's not a 5th but it is less than a fifth 23% it's not a quarter but it's less than 1/4 so in the same way like 28% you can say slightly more than 1/4 or you can just say more than 1/4 you can say just under a third you can say just under 1/2 or just over 1/2 so you can use these modifiers just under just below just over just above slightly more slightly less to modify these is very useful vocabulary okay so now let's look at some example sentences and how we can use them so something of people said that driving to work was safer than cycling well it's 11 percent it's not 1 in 10 but it is slightly more than 1 in 10 so we can put that in there slightly more than 1 in 10 people said that driving to work was safer than cycling great now you can say 11 percent of people that's fine but this is showing how well you can use the English language you're using diversified vocabulary that's important okay so we're looking for a number that means about 15% which one means about 15% well we could say less than 1/5 so we can say less than 1/5 less than 1/5 of people stated that they cycled to work because they did not have to worry about parking great sentence all right moving on number 3 we're looking for some that means 32% okay so we could just say just under a third or just below a third both those will work well so we say the proportion of people stating that they cycled to work to reduce pollution stood at just under a third okay that's great now one thing you note about this sentence here we have we say proportion and that's a great word but you can also say percentage the percentage of people great all right last one now we're looking forward that means 23% well 23% is less than 1/4 or you can say just under a quarter that's okay too so mobile calls showed a gradual rise of less than a quarter from 2000 to 2001 so the main takeaway here is that sure you can just say the percentage is exactly and that would be correct but if you want to diversify your vocabulary and you do then you can use these phrases to modify common percentages and to give you another way to talk about numbers okay welcome to the end of video Congrats you made it so today we talked about percentages and really focus on how to talk about those pie charts well next video we're going to talk about line graphs and how to manage your vocabulary and diversify your vocabulary so that you can talk about that in many different ways so I'll see you in the next video

Channel: BestMyTest

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

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Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020