IELTS Live - Task 1 Writing – Band 9 Bar Graphs

hi students and welcome to today's live ielts class my name is adrian and i'm streaming to you live from beautiful hungary i hope everybody has had a great week and is looking forward to a fantastic weekend hi beg john hi janil hi milan nice to see your members good to see our regular students hi anne hi manpreet i'm on jot nice to see everyone here this lesson is a task one writing ban nine bar graphs so we have an interesting bar graph question today that was sent to us by beck john thank you for that and before we begin this lesson is presented to you by ae help dot com for academic ielts success check us out there for general ielts check us out at g ieltshelp.com on both of our websites we have lots and lots of materials original practice exams fully interactive course lesson videos as well as writing and speaking assistance with professional university and graduate native english speakers so definitely check those out just a quick peek this is our academic website here with the blue background click that big red button to join us there and this is the general here with the green background click that big red button to join the g ieltshelp.com website if you ever have questions about the ielts or the exam or our products you can send us an email you can contact me at adrian aehelp.com okay everyone so today we have this task one writing and tomorrow we'll have some reading and speaking let's take a look at the writing task one right away we'll get right into this uh lesson here we go so i'll always start with task one always spend 20 minutes on this task don't spend any more time make sure you have practiced the timing of these essays so that you don't go over the 20 minutes i always leave 40 minutes for task 2 task 2 of the ielts is worth twice as much as task one however that doesn't mean you can ignore task when you have to do a good job eugen i'm doing fantastic today thank you i hope you're doing well also uh here we go let's read this the following graphs show the weight distributions of people in a city in two years describe the main features and make comparisons were relevant okay so if we're not 100 percent clear we can always read it a second time the following graphs show the weight distributions of people in a city in two years describe the main features and make comparisons where relevant write at least 150 words that means minimum 150 words there is no maximum your maximum is only limited by space and time okay so keep that in mind okay sometimes students are confused keep this in mind your maximum word count and they do count the words your maximum word count is only limited by space and time and you can write 200 words if you are very fluent in english keep in mind that band 8 and 9 essays will be closer to 200 words okay especially with a complicated graph like this one so let's take a look at these graphs there's two of them okay they look very similar and i know it's a little bit blurry it's the resolution of the graph but that's okay i'm going to zoom in so that we can get a good understanding and they're quite easy to understand as long as you pay attention here so here we have uh the first bar graph and it says the weight assessment of inhabitants of charlestown in 1955 so kind of in the middle of the 20th century okay and this is what you want to remember okay i know it's a little bit blurry but i think all of you can kind of remember this that the let me just zoom in even more here so the red bar so the red part of the graph shows that people are underweight okay the green shows that people are an ideal weight so it means that it's their correct weight so they're accurate weight okay and then um the uh yellow shows that they're overweight and the orange shows that they're obese that means they're much overweight 20 percent or over their ideal weight okay so underweight ideal overweight obese so one way to remember this when you're doing this in the ielts of course is the graph the bars from top down are going from lower to greater weight okay and green if you think about uh green is good red is bad um green is the ideal weight underweight is uh not as heavy as they should be and then uh these are heavier than they should be okay so hopefully that's uh fairly clear now here at the bottom of the graph we have the age range so we have 20 to 29 year olds which means young adults then we have 30 to 39 year olds 40 to 49 year olds 50 to 59 year olds and then 60 to 69 year olds so we have 10 year age groups going from 20 to 30 and then all the way up from 60 to 70 basically so those are our age groups everybody following me so far so everybody sees how i'm moving through this graph so far to kind of understand the data that i'm looking at okay everybody on on page so far yeah okay members are saying yep got it okay good don't want to lose you all right and then on the y-axis this is called the y-axis we simply have the percents okay and that's quite clear here so here we have 100 here we have 90 and then decreasing so of course from bottom up it's increasing from zero to a hundred percent and that of course is the number of people in this data okay so of the hundred percent of people in the data so let me just kind of show you what this means so this is charlestown in 1955 okay and if i'm looking at this first bar which is the group of 20 to 29 year olds then this means that in 1955 of the 100 of 20 to 29 year olds uh roughly 30 percent of them were underweight and roughly 68 of them were an ideal weight so 68 were the correct weight the perfect weight and then only about two or three percent of people were overweight there's nobody that's obese here okay so if i look at this one here for the 40 to 49 year olds then this means that in 1955 in charleston roughly about 15 so this would be about 15 percent and you do have to do a little bit of math here looking at this data okay so about 15 of the people from 40 to 49 were underweight and then roughly about uh 10 20 30 40 50 plus 10 here so about 60 percent of people were the ideal weight and then roughly about twenty percent were overweight and about five percent were obese okay so everybody is understanding so far how we read these kinds of bars so this is kind of a unique type of bar graph and you might see this in your exam and the computer-based exam it could be colors like this and then the paper-based exam it would be different shades of gray okay everybody's clear so far on how we interpret these bars okay we don't have to analyze yet we just want to get a clear understanding of these bars so let's take a look at the second bar okay because we do have a second bar here which is basically the same idea okay so it's the exact same type of bar graph and most of the information is the same except for the year okay so here the year is 2000 2015 so how much time is uh between this data and the previous data i am i'm doing great thanks for asking um so uh how many years abhimaan says 60 years yeah that's correct so you want to pay attention to that 60 years okay 50 1955 plus 2015 at 60 60 years okay all right so there's a 60-year difference okay so um 60-year difference well noted now we have all of the information to start this essay okay so to begin the essay we write an overview you don't need a separate introduction to paraphrase the question it can all just go into one paragraph you're not going to lose marks and in fact it just reads and looks better okay so the overview is two parts first it's a paraphrase of the question please don't just repeat the question it's a paraphrase of the question with details okay and then the second part of the overview is the most observable feature all right so here we have this information again now we went through the two graphs so it's charlestown okay the name of the place is charlestown 1955 um and um 2015 okay so i'm going to give you some help here so the name the town is called charleston or charlestown i believe let me just take a look at how they spell that never misspell it charlestown okay the data is for 1955. and for 2015 so i want to use that okay the categories are underweight ideal overweight and obese okay so going from light to heavy the age groups are from 20 to 69 and there are i believe five yeah five groups with 10 years okay so this is all of the information that you should be using oh and of course uh bar graphs so when you paraphrase the question which all of you should be doing now as i'm saying this you want to keep this information in mind and add this information to paraphrasing this information here okay let's see how some of you are doing um so aman jaat says the column bar graphs two of them amanja illustrate the percentage of weight assessment of inhabitants of charlestown for five age groups in the years 1955 and 2015. okay amanja you're on the right track just pay attention that it's two column graphs okay and maybe give the range for that age okay or the age groups okay otherwise you're looking good okay abhishek says the given bar charts depict the mass distribution of individuals through underweight ideal overweight and obese in five different age groups in a city of tr in the city of charlestown in 1955 and 2015 very nice abhishek your english has really improved a lot i hope you are you are also seeing and feeling that it's much more accurate now abhishek than it used to be un says the given two bar charts depict the percentage regarding five groups of charlestown's people's weights over a span of 60 years um and it's not over a span of 60 years because there's no continuity it's not a line grab so it's uh just uh in two years it could be it could look very different in 1985 okay we don't know that right it's not a line graph careful beck john says the given two bar graphs illustrate the percentage of inhabitants whose weight is either underweight ideal overweight or obese in charlestown in uh two years 1955 and 2015. yeah um very good uh beck john just be careful with the spelling of percentage people's age range from 20 to 69 and is divided into five groups okay good that's looking good so uh i'm going to write my paraphrase as well so the given [Music] the two it's more specific bar graphs illustrate the various weights of five different age groups categorized as underweight ideal overweight and obese in the city of of charlestown for the year years 1955 and 2015. so there is my paraphrase uh with those uh details okay all right so one more time the two bar graphs illustrate the various weights of five different age groups categorized as underweight ideal overweight and obese in the city of charlestown for the years 1955 and 2015. okay so far so good so that's my paraphrase with details okay shaq says yeah i think i saw this yeah shucks this was requested by beck chun so i'm sure this is one of the popular bar graphs floating around out there that's why we're uh covering uh this okay all right everybody get focused okay so and now that we have this now we want to look for the main feature so what is the most obvious feature okay so let's take a look at this i'm going to kind of shrink the screen you're going to get a bit of brights kind of side glare there but uh that's fine when we're looking at the main feature we're just looking for the main pattern so we're not looking for any detailed information we're just kind of looking at what we can identify right away by looking at this bar graph okay so here um we have uh this bar graph for 1955 we can see these nice big green bands there seems to be some kind of a pattern here as well um and then when we move to 2015 um we see a different kind of pattern here as well and we can also see that each age group shows a different distribution for these categories of underweight ideal and obese okay so what is the main feature so when you look at this you shouldn't have to look at any numbers or words just by looking at these colored bands you should be able to identify the main feature what is that so what's the main feature what do we notice mostly without really giving it too too much thought so what's our immediate observation okay so what do we notice all right so muksud says at first glance it is clear that individuals were much more fit in 1995 than in 2015. i think that's observable mug sued sure okay i think you could state that you could you can go from that yeah uh jaineel says there's significant variations between age groups and the ideal weight category of people in the years yeah gineal absolutely that's what i notice as well so each age group seems to have a different distribution of these weight categories and the two years appear very different as well okay so it's not that obesity increased so much we can talk about that more semena in the analysis but even more prominent so even more clear is the fact that there's definite differences between each of these age groups within each year and significant differences between the two years okay uh baghdad says obesity is increasing while the ideal weight is shrinking i agree bec gen but i think that's more important for the analysis okay so here we're just looking at it more from a surface perspective all right there is some obesity in 1955 but not much i believe yeah just a little bit for the 40 50 and 69 so make sure that your data is accurate okay i think i like gineal's uh over view or the main feature here the most okay so immediately it is clear that there is significant variance of weight distributions among age groups and between the two years okay so that's what's most obvious all of the rest of the information like obesity is increasing and the ideal weight is decreasing we can talk about that later okay so we can talk about that in the analysis now uh also pay attention here students some of you made this mistake when i was reading uh the comments um [Music] the uh variance of weight distributions among age groups okay when you have more than two and here we have five age groups then you have to use among when you have two like we have two years 1955 and 2015 then you can use between is everybody clear on the difference of using among and between everybody has the idea okay when to use among when to use between if you use those incorrectly the examiner will catch it you will lose marks okay so among the five age groups between the two years okay there's a conversation between two people and there's a conversation among three people okay it's important good everybody's got it right so don't make that mistake pay attention to it okay all right cool so now that we have our overview we can get into the analyses and this is where we can get into more granular detail and we can talk about um the actual uh increases decreases comparisons but we have to do that in a logical way okay we have to do that in a clever clever way so i'm just going to transfer that down here and then um what do you think so what should we do here should we um what what are the comparisons that we can make in just a second i'll get you back on camera here i saw that it shut down meanwhile you can think about that while you have a glimpse of my beautiful baby girl she's now four but she's six months old in the picture um and she's tiny and happy as should be everybody so [Music] here we go okay we're back on camera and uh again uh what are the comparisons so what kind of comparisons can we make here what are the what are the points of comparison okay thanks muhammad i appreciate that all right um so beck john says let's look at the ideal weights in the two years okay so back john first of all we can compare the two years right okay um and then we can do comparison among weights right so we have the different four categories so we can compare these okay we can compare the age groups right and we can compare the years so that that's our points of comparison okay the years the different weight groups and the ages okay um what do you think is a good idea to start with so should we start right away by comparing the two years should we compare the 20 year olds in 1955 to the 20 year olds in 19 in 2015 or should we compare so should we compare this way or should we compare this way what do you think is the most systematic so when i mean this way i mean from 2000 or 1955 to 2015. so what's our logical comparison here logical point of comparison so some of you are saying well i think it's firstly interesting to compare um between age groups within the year right so age within the year first and then between the years yeah that's probably what i would do okay so what i would do is look at 1955 first discuss the trend of weights in among the age groups then i would look at 2015 discuss the trends among age groups here and then i would discuss the comparison between the two years does that make sense so first 1955 age group comparisons then 2015 age group comparisons and finally comparison of weights weight distributions between the two years okay so i'm going top to bottom and then top compared to bottom okay it makes logical sense with the graph as well all right if you start right away by comparing the two years it could get really confusing for your reader okay all right so let's do it this way and the reason we can do this fairly smoothly is because there are trends okay so we can definitely see trends so here for instance we're not going to start with this but here for instance we can see that obesity increases every decade going from 20 to the 60 year old age group right we can also see that the ideal weight tends to decrease as we move from 20 to 40 okay but that's coming a little bit later on uh let's start with 1955 so let's move from past to more recent times okay so um what pattern do we notice here we notice this pattern here right of the ideal weight okay so here we have more underweight people a very small amount of overweight people and then here the ideal weights are pretty good so the ideal weight percentage um flux goes from roughly about let's say uh 70 percent uh to a little bit less this is roughly uh let's say uh 10 20 30 40 almost 50 so let's just say 50 for simplicity's sake okay so 70 60 60 60 50 for the ideal weight and then the underweight it decreases and then increases again here right and the same pattern is the inverse for overweight and obese okay with very few people being obese now here you don't want to just report numbers so you have to be very careful to say seventy percent sixty percent fifty percent forty percent ten percent because that's not valuable for your reader your goal is to interpret the data okay all right so here we go um let's uh think about the pattern here let's think about what we should write about uh first okay um so uh this would be my number one this would be my number two and this would be my number three okay with 3b mentioning uh obese okay all right so let's start with those let's not even worry too much about 2015 because we can do that after so let's first describe the ideal weight percentages in 1955 and then let's talk about the underweight percentages and then the overweight and obese percentages so first describe this pattern this green pattern here okay all right get a head start while i erase and then i will do the same okay so here we go with the analysis you okay so there's my first sentence um beck john says going into detail it is evident that there were more people who have ideal weight in each age group starting with around a third of young adults and finishing with the half of the elderly in 1955. um careful because it's not a third it's two-thirds of young adults okay so 70 percent is closer to two-thirds all right careful one-third is just 30 percent half of elderly is okay you're close but i think we can describe that a little bit better okay all right on says at deeper analysis in 1955 the ideal uh weight people underwent a downward trend started at 70 percent of the youngest age group and then steadily fell by 20 to 50 percent of the elderly uh on it still really feels like you're writing for a line graph you want to be careful about that yeah i would rephrase that okay it's sounding too much like a line graph you need to be careful that you're looking at a bar graph here not a line graph okay make sure everybody's clear on the distinction between writing for a line graph and a bar graph okay niha says in 1955 mostly people were an ideal weight who under the 20 to 29 age group but it decreased by 20 and senior citizens till the end okay not bad this is a challenging bar graph everyone so i do realize and respect that that's why we're looking at this today bobo murad says overall in the fir at first glance the most noteworthy um data is that obese people in the age group of 60 to 69 had a considerable leap whereas the ideal slumped down significantly i don't think that's what we see bubba murad so here our first point of comparison is that big green band okay erkin says looking at more details within the year 1955 the proportion of ideal weight among age groups decreased from 70 to more than half of the age group more than 60 years it's not that significant so if you think about it students as we get older our weights tend to vary more and going from seventy percent ideal to fifty percent ideal in a forty year span it's not that big of a deal so uh don't get hung up on that so much uh take a look at my analysis of that green band at deeper observation the majority of people in charlestown in 1955 were an ideal weight okay so if we look at this graph here the green is very dominant okay yeah we have a bit of red going on there but the green is dominant so if we take all of these people most of them are an ideal weight if we put all of these people into one room then most of them are an ideal weight okay that's important for whoever's looking at this graph does that make sense and then i follow this up by saying around 70 of 20 year olds okay so 20 21 22 so 20 year olds and roughly 60 to 50 percent of the other age groups fell into this category so i don't mention any fall or rise or increase i just say that 60 to 50 percent because if we look just to make it a little bit clearer um if we look at this then we have maybe 60 60 and then maybe 50 here okay does that make sense in this case how that works so mostly ideal 70 percent of 20 year olds and then 60 to 50 percent for the other age groups okay so don't over complicate sometimes when these graphs look really complex just step back and think simple okay all right good it looks like everybody's clear on that okay now let's discuss underweight so here is the underweight category here okay um 20 year olds are underweight uh roughly 28 okay and then this is uh 20 20 and this is uh 10 20 30 41 now again don't get stuck on the percentages okay uh look more towards the pattern okay so look at the pattern and describe this trend this pattern you might use one or two of these percents but definitely don't start listing all of them instead look at the pattern so here there's an increase in underweight people sorry here there's a decrease in underweight people and here there's an increase in underweight people okay so this is decreasing and this is increasing okay so look at that pattern there and write that sentence all right it's not a line graph again you want to keep that in mind but we definitely see a decrease with the with each progression or with each age range progression and then here with the uh added 10 years to each group we see an increase okay so uh nyashi is asking how do i know the percentages well i know the percentage is because this is a hundred percent okay and this here is fifty percent sixty percent okay i can there's lines here ninety percent okay everybody sees those or it's clear on that so the full bar this full bar here is one hundred percent okay so this red is 28 of the hundred percent this red is 20 of the hundred percent is everybody everybody clear on that now okay all right um i wouldn't yeah you could use fluctuate in this case there's definitely a possibility i don't think we see any kind of fluctuation in this year in 1955 but you could use that uh hut patel if it's accurate it's not accurate here okay um oh it says in the same year in the second position the rate of underweight of all age ranges was 15 to 41 percent uh os it's okay but i don't think that you're really revealing this trend so you have to be a little bit more precise okay uh vaishnavi don't really refer to the color especially because in the paper-based exam you will not have a color graph like this so instead refer to the trend and if you have to then refer to the percentages okay but don't say the red color indicating underweight it's not necessary okay all right niha i think if you say that 41 of senior citizens were underweight when it was less for the 40 to 49 then you're going backwards and it's just a small piece of the bigger trend you want to focus on describing this full trend okay all right so amanjat says looking at more detail the pattern of underweight age group is initially expanding but the middle age is 40 to 49 somewhat contracting shrinking after that the percentage of underweight people increases by 40 okay it's not bad so make sure you link information always write for your reader as if they are not looking at this graph so think about it like a presentation okay maybe you're in a health sciences class if you're studying medicine studying to be a nurse studying to be a doctor this could be a typical graph in your classes okay so in the same year all right so that's all i'm going to say here i'm going to do it in two sentences uh in the same year so just so that my reader knows we're still in 1955. underweight citizens ranged from 15 to 41 percent this weight category decreased from the 20s age group to the 40s so we know that we're decreasing somewhere from this number to the 15 percent and then increased again to the 60s and over citizens okay or to the 60 and over group let's say that okay so that's a very clear way all right to identify this change now if i have a lot of time if i'm a fast writer i might get more specific and i might write something like uh this weight category decreased from the 20s age group at 20 or 28 to the 40s age group and then increased again to the 60s and over group to 41 so that could make it clear but it's not absolutely necessary to do that okay thinking critically a good reader will clearly identify this okay and i'm not mentioning the 30s and the 50s group because it's unnecessary here okay so i could do that but again i want to stay away from too many numbers so it's not absolutely necessary to do that because i want to stay away from the numbers and it's clear even without it okay all right so now does everybody clearly understand this or i don't want to lose everyone so does everybody understand these two sentences in the same year underweight citizens ranged from 15 to 41 this weight category decreased from the 20s age group at 28 to the 40s age group and then increased again to the 60 and over age group at 41 i don't need to say 15 here because it's understood uh from my previous sentence here okay again always pay attention to understood information okay so the graph looks complicated the ideas look complicated but you notice that the writing is not actually that complex okay so i'm looking more for patterns than individual pieces of data all right if you get stuck the the big big danger here students when you get this kind of a two bar graphs for your task one is if you get stuck on little pieces of data there's no way that you're going to write a clear coherent task one in 150 words in 20 minutes so does everybody see why it's really important to look at the patterns here more importantly than looking at each individual piece of data okay that clear i'm on jot please keep it in english okay yeah okay all right um so now we have this third piece here which is overweight and obese okay and again we want to kind of indicate this pattern here and because there's just such a small group of obese people for this whole graph i probably wouldn't detour and focus on this specifically so i would just name this whole pattern here in one go so try that and then we'll compare okay all right so i'm gonna write a little bit here you you okay all right and so here we go this is what i wrote okay so uh the inverse pattern was true for overweight and obese people as underweight people but with fewer numbers overall there was just two percent of 20 to 29 year olds that were overweight and this increased to a quarter of 40 to 49 year olds before decreasing slightly in each consecutive age group so here what i've done with these two sentences is described this pattern here okay and now if i'm really writing quickly i might say that very few people were obese in this in 1955 as a final note okay period okay so now i've clearly described 1955. okay chuck says i consider this to be too complicated shucks it's not that complicated it just takes a lot of english and critical thinking here to get this right so now what i want to show you is my word count for the analysis so far okay so my word count for the analysis so far is 120 words wow so i probably with my overview already have my 150 words now i have to be really careful where am i in my 20 minutes i still have a whole second bar graph to go here i only have maybe five six minutes what should i do okay well in this case if i don't have a lot of time if i know that i only can do maybe about 50 more words what would what would be a good strategy if you're hey if you're band-aid band 9 and you're like i can do another 70 80 words and just do the full description for the next bar or bar graph fine but if you don't have that if you're a band 7 let's say and you're like i only have about 50 60 words left in me before i need to go to uh the task 2 what should i do here oh it says just start putting in percentages no uh knee specialist says conclusion no urkin says mirror the effect of 1955 and 2015. yeah very good janeil says that as well yeah so all you would want to do in this case if you're running out of time and space because you have only about 50 words left is instead of going through this graph okay you want to just compare the two so go from 1955 and make comparisons so you would do something like right away so notice that here very few people were obese in 1955. i would do something like this is in stark contrast okay stark here means extreme okay so this is in stark contrast to 60 years later when a large proportion of charleston citizens are obese okay so i go right into a direct comparison from here from the obese people this is in stark contrast to 60 years later when a large proportion of charleston's inhabitants are obese especially the 50s and 60s age groups okay does everybody see how i did that so i'm like okay i'm running out of time i definitely want to compare between the graphs and i definitely want to give some details here so if i finished with the obese then boom obese is very prominent here might as well just start contrasting that and then contrast the underweight and then contrast the ideal okay and you can do that in about 50 words and get a band 9 as long as you're doing it well which you can do for homework because i'm out of time so uh i've kind of done it here for the obese try it for the ideal weight category and try it for the uh overweight or underweight category so try to do that immediate contrast don't write a lot of words maybe write another 40 50 words okay to complete the essay all right in this case it's very likely that you're going to get to a summary which is fine okay you can still get a band nine you have a lot of information here even doing a comparison of patterns between the two years okay so um when it looks really complicated keep your thinking simple look for patterns and really identify a logical system of comparison okay all right so uh aehelp.com for academic aisle students you'll find lots more for task one help there and for generalized students to get help with task one letter writing visit glshelp.com spend a couple dollars on joining the premium package and you won't regret it uh we really never have students who do uh so check us out there you're welcome everyone tomorrow i will be back with reading for members and um speaking for the all chat class thanks for joining thanks for bearing with me i know that was a challenging topic for today and thanks again beck john for sending it i'm adrian signing out from budapest for now see you tomorrow much love to all of you take care be strong you

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Keywords: IELTS writing task 1, diagram, pie chart, line graph, bar chart, flow-chart, IELTS descriptions, International English Language Testing System, English examination, writing for graphs, writing for charts, writing for tables, IELTS task 1, Lesson, Teacher, Learn, Student, Lessons, Learning, Free, Intro, Tutorial, IELTS task 1 explain, IELTS task 1 learning, IELTS task 1 descriptions

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Length: 56min 46sec (3406 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020