IELTS Task 1 Line Graphs in 5 Simple Steps

hi everyone Chris here from Isleton Vantage comm hope that you're all doing well and in today's lesson we're gonna look at task 1 line graphs now one of the main issues with line graphs or task 1 academic in general is and students over complicate them so it's not your fault you not used to dealing with data and not used to dealing with graphs and the topics can be on funny things and one of the things that I find is students over complicate things and make things way more difficult than they really need to be so what I try and do with my students is just simplify everything as much as possible so that on test day they know exactly what to do and in their preparation they're able to prepare in a way that takes all the stress out of it and shows them exactly what to do so we're going to show you that in this lesson we're going to give you a simple 5 step system for how to write a task 1 line graph report and this is just for academic sorry few general training people you'll find other general training videos and on this YouTube channel so go and take a look there also just to emphasize two points number one this is a simplified version of what you're going to get in the real test just because I'm doing it on the board and everything and don't think that this is going to be as simple as this and it'll be a little bit they'll be a little bit more detail in the real test but for the purposes of demonstration I've simplified it a little bit and number two this stuff that I'm going to talk about today is just for line graphs and so task 1 academic you might get a bar chart you might get pie charts you might get a table you might get multiple combinations of those you might get a process that you have to describe or a map that you have to describe the stuff that I'm going to talk about today is just four line graphs and I what I do with my students is again making making it as simple as possible I treat each of those differently I'll show them how to think about them and do them and individually like that okay so let's get going so five simple steps and let's start off with step one so the first thing is to understand so many of you in your writing tests we'll just look at thee and the line graph and time is an issue so you're under pressure under stress and you'll maybe do a brief plan look at it very quickly and then start writing so it's impossible to write and a good task one response tasks one academic response if you don't first understand what you're writing about it doesn't matter who you are or how good you are at writing doesn't matter how much you practiced or how good your teacher is if you don't understand the thing you're not going to be able to write about it accurately so this is the the probably the most important stage so let's have a look at how we would understand this so first of all you would have a look at the the question here so the line graph below shows active daily users on Facebook in three different countries so try and understand as much of this as possible but do realize that you don't have to understand everything in order to write a good report so active daily users you don't need to be mark zuckerberg to understand what this means or you don't have to have a really in-depth knowledge of you know data on the internet to really be able to write a good report you might know kind of what this means but what many of the students that I work with tell me is when they see one thing in a question especially for task one academic and they they feel that they don't perfectly 100% understand that thing that can cause a lot of stress and they're they're just like oh I don't know what I'm doing don't worry don't panic if there's something that you don't understand a hundred percent you probably have a very good idea of what it means and just continue on so the first thing is to understand this so line graph you understand that what that means active daily users you probably understand what that means or most of you will understand it kind of and Facebook I'm sure you understand what that is in three different countries okay so the next thing we need to understand is don't look at any of this all right if you look at this first you're going to get lost in all the data and it can be very intimidating and confusing so don't look at any of this first right look at this first and then have a look the x-axis X is across that's a good way to remember that X is across look at the x-axis understand what that is okay so have a look at this 2007 eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen okay so it's it's data over time it is a dynamic set of data over time and it starts in the past and it ends in the past and it's from 2007 and increases up to 2004 so you might be thinking I don't have time to do all of this so you're not going to be doing it as slowly as I'm doing it at the moment you'll be quickly looking at that then quickly looking at their X and y axis so do you understand what that means sure that's no problem then have a look at Vietnam Cambodia Thailand do you understand what those are there are three different countries all right so we've understood what those are then have a look here daily users in millions all right so active daily users this is the number here on the y-axis I'm under 10 million so 5 million 10 million 15 million 20 million 25 million so taking 30 seconds or one minute to fully understand what this means makes this part much much much easier and you'll be much calmer you'll know exactly what you're doing so now that you've understood all of this then you can have a look at the data and try and understand the data so for a line graph over time the the thing that you'll normally see are this and again I'm not oversimplifying this generally if you look at real IELTS task 1 line graphs you'll see normally one generally going up when generally going down maybe one staying the same or one fluctuating like this so if you understand those it's very important for your overview just have a look and look at the data generally you don't have to fully understand everything right now you just have to generally understand everything so ignore that you've done that you've understood everything and as you can see if you break it down step by step as I do with my students and it makes it much much easier so you're going from something that is very intimidating to something that's as easy as 1 2 3 just like ok yep that's simple I know exactly how to think about it and what to do the next stage is very important planning that's why I put it in red so it's very important that we're going to talk about the structure to use the general things you're going to be doing and it's very important just to note down a general structure that you're going to use make some notes on the key features on the key data and that's an investment of time that's very very worthy you you're not going to waste that time and so I would spend maybe five minutes in this stage and I call this that the thinking stage so understanding and planning just doing all your thinking maybe spend about five minutes not exactly five minutes so some students when you tell them five minutes they plan exactly for five minutes you know two minutes - six minutes something anywhere around that don't get to hook up hung up on on on time so this is the thinking stage and then steps two to four are the writing stage all right you're going to be thinking of course in this but if we break it break it up it makes it simple and then step five is the checking stage making sure everything is done properly so step two we're gonna have to paraphrase the question all right so paraphrasing the question is taking this and paraphrasing it stating in it it with different words so that means the same thing so expressing it differently so that it means the same thing and I'm not gonna get into a whole lesson about paraphrasing because that would take you know hours or M itself and we don't have time to do that and but you should learn how to paraphrase it's very very important that you learn how to do that and because it's a really really good test of your vocabulary and your grammar and that's why it's important it's a really good test of a student's ability and so you should learn how to do that so that will be your first paragraph alright so your first paragraph is going to be a part of you're going to paraphrase the question skip a line and then go into the overview nine there's a huge there's a lot of conflicting and confusing information about overviews and some people call them conclusions and some people say you should put them at the end of your of your response some people say you could put them after it doesn't really matter all that you should understand about overviews and in this context is they're not conclusions all right conclusions are for your task to response but a lot of teachers call them conclusions incorrectly so when you hear people talking about conclusions they're probably talking about overviews all right when I talk about overview I'm talking about an overview because that's what it is and and it doesn't really matter where you put it all right I tell my students to put it after because it makes it much easier to think about and but what you could do is you could put it at the end if you want so write a clear overview so for the purposes of task task one line graphs what you're going to do is you're going to be if it's over time so line graphs are normally over time so what you're going to be doing is you're going to be thinking about the general trends over time for your overview this is different for pie charts and tables and processes and all those different things but for the purposes of a line graph over time which they nearly always are you're looking for the general trends and they are very very simple so for Vietnam it goes up for Cambodia it fluctuates for Thailand it goes done remember you could put another one in that stays kind of the same that stay stable but it doesn't need to be any more complicated than that again when I was talking about students getting lost in the data and they get so engrossed in the data and get so confused with all the data and over complicate everything and then at the end of the lesson when I when I share this with my students and I said well your overview is basically one goes up one goes down and one fluctuates that's so simple why did I not see that don't over complicate everything for line graphs over time you're looking from the general trends from the start to the end so from the start to the end for Vietnam it goes up from Thailand it goes down from Cambodia it fluctuates for line graphs over time nine times out of ten it's going to be like that you do not need to overcomplicate it ok so step four so you've you wrote paragraph 1 paraphrase the question you've finished your overview which is the most important part that if you don't do not write it a clear overview if you do not include the key features it's impossible for you to get a 7 or above just forget about it so if you're struggling to get a 7 or above in the whole test you should be focusing on on overview so if that is your weakness but get some feedback on that it's really important that you write a good overview step 4 write to details paragraphs so what you're doing is you're going to write your first details paragraph in your second details paragraph not all the as do this a step-by-step system because you have to be flexible with task one it's because the data is always going to be changing so it's very difficult to apply objective criteria to subjective data but in general what you're going to be doing is you're going to be breaking up the the data in two stages look at are there any areas that you could break it up so that you can talk about it so for example Thailand you could maybe break that up from 2006 to 2009 so you could be talking about it started at twenty five million on 2009 it was at seventeen and a half million and then it dropped sharply to around twelve and a half million so that's one stage here and then that's the second stage and this is a stage a different stage here so you could talk about the data from 2010 to 2013 and then lastly this stage say Vietnam so Vietnam the stages are there's only really two stages goes up here and then here so you could talk about 2006 to 2010 and then 2010 to 2014 you're just breaking it up so that it's easy for you to talk about so once you've done that then you can very importantly check do not move on to task two or if you've done task one second do not just put your pan down check everything you should be checking your grammar you should be checking your vocabulary checking your paraphrasing checking your overview checking your data especially check your data make sure that it is accurate that's basically it braking line graphs turn into five simple steps I normally take questions but it's the hottest day of the year here and the studio lights here are and very very hot so I'm going to go because

Channel: IELTS Advantage

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Keywords: IELTS, IELTS Task 1, Line Graphs, www.ieltsadvantage.com, ielts advantage, Live Lesson, Subscribe, IELTS Task 1 Line Graphs in 5 Simple Steps, Line Graphs in 5 Simple Steps, IELTS Task 1 Line Graphs, Chris Pell, English, learn english, ielts test, IELTS writing, academic training, IELTS 5 steps, Youtube, Instagram, twitter, Facebook, international english language testing system, ielts writing task 1, ielts writing task 2, lesson, how to, english teacher, ielts preparation

Id: lnL0qvcVo1Q

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018