IELTS Live - Task 1 Writing - Band 9 Pie Chart Composition

hi students and welcome to today's live ielts class my name is adrian and i'm streaming to you from beautiful victoria here on the west coast of canada i hope everybody has had a great week and i hope you're all looking forward to a fantastic weekend in today's live class right now we are looking at ielts task 1 writing and we are going to be looking at the academic task one writing which is some kind of an expository essay where you have to explain and interpret a graph or a chart or a table in today's example we are looking at a pie chart and we are looking specifically on how to compose a band 9 essay this is a members chat class of course everybody is welcome to watch welcome to our newest member resume haley uh make sure to send me an email so i can hook you up with your perks those videos the requests and exams to become a member of our channel simply click the join button next to the subscribe button while we wait for a few more members this lesson is presented to you by ae help.com for academic ielts success lots of help with the writing as well as the speaking and other sections of the exam check us out there for the general ielts visit us at g ielts help dot com that's general ieltshelp.com on both of these websites we have lots and lots of information to help you improve your communication and english skills this is our academic ielts website here with the blue background you can click this big red button to join the premium package and uh we are an ielts test registration center and certified agents so you're in good hands with us for general ielts same idea green background click that big red button one time payment lifetime access very much worth every dollar that you spend it's not expensive not compared to the ielts exam but you will give yourself a much better chance to get a great score all right let's see who's joined in so far welcome carolina our moderator and hi rashika good to have the two of you in the class as well if you have any questions send me an email contact me at adrian aehelp.com and i will get back to you in due course after this class we will continue listening part 3 and part 4 from the listening exam that we started yesterday that will be an all chat class where everybody will be able to join in on the fun uh hi june welcome nick hill awesome great to have you all in the class okay let's get going on today's ielts task one writing so we're going to work through this together nice and smooth you get to the ielts uh writing section you have one hour for this section it's really important to practice your timing time is very valuable of course throughout the test especially in the writing section you have to really just use your time wisely start with task one spend 20 minutes on task one do not spend more than 20 minutes on task one okay 20 minutes maximum okay let's read this question so the following charts show the percentage of volunteers by organizations in canada according to several categories report the main features and make comparisons were relevant write at least 150 words just really quickly a reminder that high band essays and i've talked to many examiners about this and they are all in agreement that high band essays tend to be closer to 220 words for task one okay so they say it's minimum 150 words because that's the least amount that you need to even get close to explaining all the information that's provided but again high band essays they tend to give more detail they tend to give more explanation and interpretation here so they tend to be slightly longer by about thirty forty percent okay so here we have our pie charts for today okay uh yeah june um it's not good if you're taking time from task two so i see your comment there that you're going about five minutes over you have to uh try to find a way to reduce uh the time it's taking you to complete task one by that five minutes okay i do not recommend going over the time um 40 minutes is already quite short for task two i think 40 minutes for task two is actually less than 20 minutes is for task one okay i actually all right so here we have our pie charts um and uh right away we observe that uh pie chart one is 2008 um pie chart two is 2014. uh each pie chart has six slices one two three four five six all right so that means we've got six categories of volunteer organizations they're here at the bottom dark blue environmental organizations um kind of this orange red is art gray is sports yellow is healthcare light blue is educational and green is others okay so uh step number one using the information from the pie charts using the information from the legend legend is the definition of the different colors in the pies so using this legend using the title of the pies which in this case is 2008 and then 2014 um we can write the introduction to this pie chart in combination of course with the question itself okay so step number one members viewers is always write the introduction by paraphrasing the question and giving more detail okay so this is your first step of interpretation all right so again i reiterate so step one use the question paraphrase it and give it more detail by using the information in the charts in this case all right so i want to really give you a chance to um to do this before i show you what it should look like so go ahead members and here june is a good chance to practice that time limit that fluency in the writing so being quick so go ahead members using these pie charts write write the introduction for me by paraphrasing the question and giving more details i'll show you the uh pie charts one more time here just changing my font size so i fit a little bit easier in here okay all right so once again here's the original question the following charts show the percentage of volunteers by organizations in canada according to several categories report the main features and make comparisons were relevant you don't need to paraphrase that second sentence uh for the introduction and then again here are the charts it's 2008 2014 and the legend shows the organizations as environmental art sport healthcare educational and others okay so go ahead and create that first couple of sentences uh to introduce okay so introduction you do not need to write introduction in your ielts exam i'm just writing that so you're clear on it okay all right go ahead uh don't look at the board until you finish yours and then after you're done compare with me so all right christine karis antonio welcome to our group of members it's great to have you on board make sure to uh send me an email so i can hook you up with those exclusive videos okay let's see who's got this introduction done so again you shouldn't be taking too much longer for an introduction like this okay and the introduction that i have just to give you an idea of the word count uh so far is 33 words so it's a 33 word introduction for this type of question or this level of complexity okay all right june writes these two pie charts compare the proportions of volunteers involved in six organizations in canada namely environmental art sport healthcare educational and others in the years 2008 and 2014. june that's fantastic nick hill says these two pie charts illustrate the proportion of participants who help in six different kinds of organizations educational environmental art sport healthcare and others in 2008 and 2014 comma in canada yeah nick hill companies is a bit awkward in this case um because they're um organizations so they're maybe charities could be a little bit better okay akshay says the two pie charts illustrate the proportion of volunteers who work in six different sectors environmental education art sports healthcare and others in 2008 uh in canada and six years later in 2014. yeah i would write akshay it's very good um i the end of it i would change a little bit so in 2008 and six years later in 2014 comma in canada okay rashika the two pie charts illustrate the proportion of six different types of volunteers environmental art health care sports educational and others by sectors in canada in 2008 and 2014. firms again in this context rashika doesn't make too much sense for these volunteer organizations okay again charities might make a little bit more sense um but they're not necessarily charities right so that's why i would keep the word organizations sectors is okay all right uh depica says the two pie charts depict the proportion of volunteers among various fields including environmental art sports healthcare educational uh organizations and others in the years 2008 and 2014. um deepika you don't need given and you don't need organizations okay those are unnecessary words and for band nine you want to be concise if you're wordy you can't get a band nine if you have a lot of unnecessary words in your essays uh in task one and task two it's called wordiness in english and having wordiness in your writing is actually considered a negative especially at the highest levels of writing so that would be your band nine right [Music] proportions um is probably the better choice in this case because we have multiple uh proportions yeah so proportions of volunteers is better okay all right i wrote uh these two pie charts depict the percentage of volunteers in canada by involvement in six different organizations um education environmental art sports healthcare and others in 2008 and six years later in 2014 and uh to make it a little bit clearer uh it's not actually six different specific organizations but types of organizations okay so i just kept the word organizations again don't get too lost in paraphrasing be careful make sure it's accurate if you're not sure that the synonym matches in the context then just keep the original word okay you can still get a band 9 as long as you write a great essay okay so what is my next step so uh members what's step number two here i've got my introduction um according to this uh question uh what's my next step after writing the introduction what does ielts need me to do for their task one academic expository essay what's my okay so nikhil says you gotta write the overview the main features yeah that's right that's kind of this part of the question here right so where it says report the main features report the main features basically says write an overview like what what can we generally see when we look at these um pie charts yeah so step two is basically write the overview the main features that you see by observing the general appearance of the charts right so uh no need to look for details yet okay all right sometimes uh students get lost in some details at this point okay i'm just going to grab this out and then put it underneath here so that we can continue on all right so the overview um main features let's take a look at this all right um so we've got our two pies uh you don't need to look at the detailed percentages yet um what do we notice so what are kind of what are the main features that jump out at you here so just by looking at the the size of each slice the size of all of the slices and then looking at the size of these slices um six years later in 2014 um what do we notice june says three of them seem to increase so okay so volunteers and three organizations seem to increase and three of them seem to decrease okay all right fair enough i can see that so this one increases this one decreases this one increases this one decreases this one increases this one decreases yeah okay i think that's a good one uh akshay says education and environmental take up a major proportion um yeah okay that's that's good too all right sure uh anybody notice anything else okay um actually try to always look beyond just the major because here we have you know 29 21 24 25 so what else do we notice anything else so take a minute here when you're looking at uh the main feature because your main feature your overview is kind of your thesis statement uh for your essay also so you want it to be quite good the better your overview the better your main feature the better your analysis will be as well okay all right do we notice anything else i mean one very simple um observation is that there's definitely a change in the proportion of volunteers in these different um environmental sectors right so uh there's movement none of them are staying the same okay that's one of the clearest first observations is that there is change in the distribution of volunteers in each of these sectors okay so that's what i would claim as the most and then i would say that there's a fairly even distribution within certain sectors as well so we don't have any extremely dominant sectors so none of them take up like 50 percent of the pie right so we have a fairly nicely cut pie if this were a pizza it's kind of like everybody would be getting a fairly good slice of that pizza except for um healthcare okay which is the seven and eight percent but everybody else seems to be getting an okay okay slice of this pizza so you have a fairly good distribution or proportional distribution of volunteers here okay and then of course what june said as well is that we see three of these proportions increasing and three of them decreasing okay yeah so june we can get into that later so june says sports replace environmental as the greatest proportion of volunteers uh from 2008 to 14 i would probably save that for my analysis june i would not include that um in the uh overview um depict the reason i didn't show you um the legend is because i don't want you to get lost in the legend so again that's going into too much detail all right so having this information let's now write the overview okay let's see how you put your overview together i'm going to do the same don't look at mine until you finish writing yours and then compare okay to see what you end up with all right all right so again you probably shouldn't be taking much uh longer than this to get your overview done okay all right and so far my overview is uh 50 words so 50 plus my introduction which is 35 so i have 85 words so far roughly okay and um when i'm done my introduction i review it and then when i'm done my overview i review it so it's a good strategy to review each of these paragraphs right after you're finished writing it check for spelling mistakes coherence mistakes okay all right so i'm going to review mine uh silently one more time while i'm still waiting for yours okay so i have an artifact here so i'm going to delete that and i'm going to move this to the end so it's a bit more sensible and put a comma in there now it's perfect all right akshay writes at first glance it is clear that among six different categories three categories show an upward trend and the rest of the categories depict a downward trend akshay careful with that we don't actually see the trend um so yeah i mean it's a tough argument but i i would be careful with the word trend akshay line graphs tend to show trends more than pie charts pie charts don't really show trends unless you have like four of them if you had 2008 2010 2012 2014 and each of them show this type of upward and downward trend in these three sectors then i think the word trend would be more applicable but with only two pie charts i don't think we can actually say that we can see a trend we see a change but not necessarily a trend we don't know what's happening in all those years between okay so actually it finishes with in addition uh volunteering in all sectors have uh slight changes um i don't know about slight changes actually i mean i think some of those changes are actually a bit so fairly significant slight changes are only a few percent but when you have like 10 20 changes um or twice as many uh volunteers in a sector that would be more than a slight change so careful with that word as well okay content is very important when you're going for that band 9 essay you need to have really good content not just good english all right so careful with it nick hill writes overall it is evident that there is some variation of volunteers in each sector by organization in the given years except health care sports education and environmental show major change while the remaining three are minor okay uh so nikhil is talking about bigger changes versus smaller changes uh that might be a good observation as well nick hill absolutely rashika writes at first glance comma it is clear that preferences of three sectors of volunteers environmental sports and health care are upward in our greater in 2014 while the popularity of the other three types decrease yeah rashika simplify those indicators of comparison okay june writes immediately it is evident that all these types of organizations experience some changes in the proportions of their volunteers furthermore three organizations had uh increased percentage while the other three had less by 2014. okay good all right uh this is what i have at first glance there seems to be a fairly even distribution of volunteers by sector in these two years with the exception of health care also it is noticeable that three sectors gain a greater percentage of volunteers while the three other sectors have a fewer ratio volunteers by 2014. okay um again you can always keep correcting i would say lower is better than fewer for ratio okay so the next step is the analysis this is where we actually get into the details based on our overview or analyses if we're talking about an in plural um and for the analyses you want to have anywhere from four to six uh points of discussion okay that should be your goal four to six points of discussion so here what do you think would be a good first point of discussion so we're talking about fairly even distributions obviously we want to discuss the changes so what do you think are good points of discussion where would we start so where would we start i know where i would start okay so where where would you start okay i'm curious so this is where each of us might have different opinions uh as the idiom goes there's more than one way to skin a cat so there's more than one correct approach to this we could do this in different ways i'm very curious on how you would do it okay so the pika says i would start with the gray okay so now i'll show you the legend yeah so we know the years we don't need to see the years so here we have environmental is the dark blue okay art is the orange sport is the gray and then healthcare education others so all right where would where would you start okay so depica says i would start with the gray one which is sport so comparing sport with these two years um yeah okay you could do that all right i might take a different approach so i'm not sure if i would uh for a band 9 i don't think i would compare each one of these individually so i don't think i would do 15 25. um you're probably looking at that because it's maybe the biggest change per proportional slice but i think it's a bit awkward so akshay says almost all categories have uh roughly a fifth of the pie except for health care okay nick hill says stating the first point in the overview the average difference of percentage in each sector and i would compare i will compare with healthcare so healthcare is this one yeah so using um the overview yeah healthcare and maybe others as well now that i'm looking a little bit more carefully so others also all right um yeah i might do it that way i think i would still do it a little bit differently now june says i will start from education and then talk about the three decreases then about the three increases so three decreases three increase increases okay um i always like to look at sizes so here we have this large slice here okay we have this large slice here and then we have this large slice here okay so if i look at those um then i'm going to look at the three same here in the other pie so here i'm going to look at this one here i'm going to look at this one here and then i'm going to look at this one here okay so my three biggest proportions in 2008 are environmental educational and art okay now these still remain significantly large portions in 2014 but the changes are different right so we have a decrease here we have an increase here and we have a decrease here okay and then if i'm looking even more at it this is an eight percent increase uh this is a um seven percent decrease and this one is a six percent decrease okay um everybody following me on that so or lower amount here okay so i would actually take these in groups based on their uh three greatest and then the three smallest okay that's how i would do it it's kind of a different way again like i said there's more than one way to skin the cat here i would approach it in this way so the three greatest how they change and then the three smallest and then i can go into more details here as well so um this would be my number one point of comparison okay you might find that a bit awkward but i think when we start writing here and comparing these um then it will make sense so try to do this with me today the way that i'm showing it to you and then you can try it a different way at home for homework okay all right and see which one you like more so uh let's make this comparison so describe this change describe this difference from a 2008 to 2014 so these three components okay all right and i'm going to introduce some new words to you while we do this as well you'll see okay so i'm going to be a little bit quiet here while i do this so i'll give you a chance to think and describe okay i'm going to leave these up here so you can see it and again uh maybe i'll even uh do a bit more here so this is educational okay so educational um and then this dark blue is environmental environmental and then um the uh red one is art okay all right okay so that's what i have there for my first uh point of comparison so again i'm grouping here okay all right and then again your level of detail so how much information you give for each of these changes really depends on the amount of speed that you have so here june is where you can um make a decision on how much information you include so while i'm waiting for this first analysis i'll give you a little bit more information here so you can include concepts like education made up nearly a quarter of the pie in 2008 however by uh 2014 it made up less than a fifth of the pie um you could also include um information like the proportion of volunteers for art um dropped by a third in uh 2014 because 18 to 12 is roughly a loss of one-third of the proportion of volunteers but again including this information you should only do it if you have more time so uh june are you doing the computer-based exam when you take the test because this is one of the big advantages of the computer-based exam is that you might have a piece of writing like what i have here for this analysis okay and i'm going to erase this now so we can see it and i see that some of you are getting your analyses ready as well so so you might have something like uh the three greatest proportions of volunteers in 2008 were involved in first education second environment and third art however by 2014 these numbers significantly changed while environmental volunteering increased by 8 percent to 29 the two other sectors decreased and became less popular than involvement in sports organizations so you might have something like this and then you're finished writing your uh task one let's say uh quote-unquote of course we're not finished yet because we have some other parts but let's say that you're finished the other parts and you still have a bit more time then you might include something like educational volunteering made up a quarter of all uh involvement in 2008 but this uh became less than a fifth of the total by uh 2014. so in the computer-based exam you can add uh pieces like this into your writing if you have some more time however i don't actually recommend doing that until you're actually finished your task two okay so this is quite an important tip that you can keep in mind okay so so i'm gonna go back to that very important point and i think carolina spoke to that as well and said you really have to practice your timing and make sure that you're finished in the 20 minutes okay so you must finish task 1 in 20 minutes or less once you have finished and reviewed task two if you still have a bit of time and you are not completely satisfied with your task one you can go back and add more details especially in the computer based practice exam or computer-based exam okay right so i think most people won't so once you're done task one and done task two you realize that um it's better to spend time reviewing and correcting than going back and adding details but you could like if you feel like oh i really missed an important point that i wanted to say there you could go back okay all right so it's just a little bit of a different way to approach that okay all right let's see what you have uh depica says the three largest pies in 2008 educational environmental and art organizations have a decrease of seven percent increase of eight percent and a reduction of six percent of voluntary participants respectively in 2014. um yeah okay all right uh good sure uh that's good topeka i like it um rashika writes by comparison the two pie charts the big proportions of the first year had changed like this health sector environmental have decreased by one percent and eight percent respectively while educational sector has decreased uh rashika i think you have some information mistakes there that you want to review okay all right yeah so june get the get the main ideas out first and then go back and add to it if if you feel like there's opportunity there for that okay um [Music] so now of course um we want to look at the smaller proportions here which are the green yellow and gray slices here so um that would be my kind of second point of comparison or these three so uh the three smaller proportions and how they change uh between these two years so here we have an increase of six percent uh we have an increase of just one percent and we have an increase of ten percent so huge different difference for sports it's actually the biggest change right so i would probably go into this detail first a then this detail second b and then this detail third c okay so let's group these and then let's um compare these so that's our second point of comparison okay all right here we go so i'm going to be a little bit faster now just so that we can get to the end of the essay before the end of the class okay sorry it's uh just a correction here um it's a decrease of six percent so i noticed that because of the overview right some of you are probably writing that right now adrian the first one was a decrease right so health care increased but others decreased okay all right all right so um this is what i wrote here uh the three smaller proportions of 2008 were sports healthcare and others two of these sectors sports and healthcare increased in percentages in 2014 while others decreased the greatest change in the two years given was involvement in sports organizations with a 10 jump in popularity to make up a quarter of all volunteering involvement in canada in 2014. okay and again i wouldn't worry too much about writing about others or about health care there's not a very significant change in health care and we don't have a lot of information on what those other organizations are so i i wouldn't spend time on that too much okay again i would want to make sure i finish this in 20 minutes and then go to task 2. if i find that i have some time remaining at the end of the writing section i might come back and include some more details about the one percent change in health care but i don't feel that it's absolutely necessary to get a band nine in this case it's much more important that i have clear clean writing okay and again same thing for the summary so i do think it's a good idea to include a summary but only do this if you are absolutely confident that you can do it within the 20 minute time limit so uh here i might write something like um so something like this i might revise it but in summary these two pie charts suggest suggest that canadians change their preferences of which organizations they preferred giving their efforts to freely from 2008 to 2014 right so um it seems like many canadians decided that giving their time freely to sports organizations giving time freelance volunteering is more important in 2014 then in 2008 right so that would be uh my summary and now if i check my word count okay i'm at uh between my summary and my analyses i'm at 156 so it's 206 with the overview plus the 35 here so i'm at 240 words here 241 words okay which is definitely that 150 word minimum in fact it's a bit more so i probably don't really need much more than this as long as i have good clear information i should be able to secure that band-aid band 9 finish for this task one okay all right i will post um this question and the graph in the um uh discord chat for us as well members so check for that i know i've got a couple of posts to make up from this week's classes but i will definitely do that today at some point i'll take a note after this class so check it out there and then again i challenge you to maybe write this essay in a different way uh than what you've seen here okay so there are different ways to write this response coming up in about 30 minutes i will host another class that will be listening part three and part four that's a continuation from yesterday's class in the sense that it's the same exam if you miss that class it's totally okay it's not necessary to have been there um akshay depika rashika june i see some summaries and that's great uh carolina thank you for moderating this class i appreciate it hopefully i will see everybody shortly for that listening class until then take care i'm adrian i'm signing out from victoria for now but i will be back soon okay bye 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

Id: BKKKaTv-rkU

Length: 56min 45sec (3405 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021