IELTS Writing Task 1 Academic- Choosing Key Features

everyone Chris here from IELTS advantage comm with another life lesson and today we're going to Besant ask one academic writing and we're going to look at probably the most important thing that you need to do which is to understand how to identify key features why is that so important well you have to include these key features in your overview and your overview is the most important part of probably your whole writing test why is that because if you don't write a good overview you can't get a 7 or above it's that simple you are going to really really struggle to get one of the higher bands if you keep failing to write an effective overview and the most important thing about an overview is your ability to look at the data understand the data and pick out the key features so there's normally two three four key things key pieces of information the most important elements in the information that you need to pull out and report in your overview so what I'm going to do in this lesson is I'm going to show you a few graphs that I put together a line graph a bar chart and a table and I'm gonna make this lesson as interactive as possible and what we're gonna do is I'm gonna show you these and you're going to try and pick out the key features the best way to think about it is if you could only say let's say three or four things about the data you only allowed to say three or four things what would those things be what is the most important things that you can spot about the data so let's get going landgraf so this is attendance at football stadium so the number of people visiting football stadiums is three football clubs Liverpool Chelsea and Leeds the x-axis year 2000 to 2018 and the y-axis number of people sixty thousand thirty thousand and zero so what I'd like you to do is take one minute don't overanalyze it don't overthink it just take one minute and in the comments just write let's say three things that you think are key features so go ahead okay so let's look at the second one this is a bar chart and it's the same three football clubs Liverpool Chelsea and Leeds but this is a little bit different the number of shirts sold so number of football shirts that each club sold and there are one two three four years 2000 2001 2002 2003 and along the y-axis five thousand three thousand and zero so take a look at this and tell me what are the two three four key features that you can identify here again just take one minute to do this don't overthink it don't overanalyze it and let me know in the comments what you think okay so hopefully wrote few key features for this one I know let's look at the third and final one which is a table again same three football clubs Liverpool Chelsea and Leeds and this time it's the amount of money that they spent on players who made the money that they spent on transfers so there are one two three four five six seven years from 2000 to 2006 have a look at the data don't overthink it the danger is with with tables you can't get a little bit lost in the data because there is so much data and dust don't try and overthink it don't try and overanalyze it just look at it for 1 minute on report there 2 3 4 key features okay so hopefully you've made an attempt at thinking and writing in the comments your key features and I let's hello look at them so Liverpool what happens between 2000 and 2018 well there is a little bit of fluctuation but in general it pretty much stays the same for leads there's a big drop it really does decrease and for Chelsea it goes up so one goes up one goes down one stays the same you do not need to make it any more complicated than that in the real exam you're not going to be writing one goes up one goes down one stays the same and you're going to write a you know a full sentence and but just picking out the key features it doesn't need to be any more complicated than that one goes up one goes down one stays the same so here if we have a look at the key features normally when I show this to students the key features here are very different from the key features here but let's actually have a look at them Leeds starts off here then goes down goes done so let's actually put a line Leeds goes done Chelsea goes up whatever pool stays the same so the key features for this one and this one are exactly the same one goes up one goes down one stays the same so I'm played a little trick on you and the reason why I did that is to get you to change your attitude get you to change your mindset about these and about how to analyze them and how to pick out the key features you're probably guessed Liverpool in 2000 and it pretty much stays the same Chelsea 9.2 it goes up leads 111 to 5.8 it goes down one goes up one goes down one stays the same so if you looked at all three of these and you had three different key features not the same something isn't quite right now why is that why do people put different key features and things like that well it's really comes down to hi this is taught in the classroom if you go to most classrooms and 90% or over 90% of classrooms in the world where this is being taught normally what the teacher will say is look at the data and try and find the biggest and the smallest or the tallest and the shortest or the highest and the lowest or the biggest changes or the biggest differences or the biggest exceptions so what happens is you go in to the test and you have these at the top of your mind and what's going to happen if this is what you've been taught this is what you're going to find no matter what the data says so is this a good way to learn I don't think so it's kind of like imagine you were moving to a new city imagine you're moving to London and all of your family tell you London's terrible the people are terrible the food's terrible the weather's terrible the traffic's terrible it's it's horrible all your family tell you it's horrible your friends tell you it's horrible when you go there you probably going to think that it's horrible because you have these preconceived ideas about what it's like on the flip side if your parents and your brothers and sisters tell you London's a wonderful place it's amazing the people are lovely you know the weather's great the food is great if you go there you'll think it's great because you have prejudged what it's going to be like but if you go there with an open mind and no preconceived ideas you're going to make up your own mind you're going to actually think about it and this is what is missing from for most of you is you're not doing this you have to think so these are basically hacks they're shortcuts they're systems none of these work these are terrible way to think about it because you're always going to find them no matter what the data is and the data is always going to change you have to think about it and I know that you don't like to hear that because people want to find shortcuts they want to find hacks they want to find tips and it's no wonder teachers teach this because this is what students want students want to be told this because then that makes them feel safe and it makes them feel that no matter what happens on test day they're going to find the correct answer and then what happens they get their test results and they fail I would prefer that you know 90% of you hate this and 10% of you will listen to me and actually start to do this which is think so what can you do instead number one stop looking for a system a hack or shortcut they're not going to help you either for task 1 academic key features or any part of the test there are some little things that you can learn and but they're not really really really going to help you number 2 take your time and look instead of opening the paper looking at the data and looking immediately for the biggest and the shortest and the the you know the biggest difference is and the exceptions and all actually just look at the data and think about it and if you think about it it will become so simple it is not as complicated as you think you think that it's really really complicated but every time my the students and I look at the actual key features the number one thing students say is I can't believe how simple that was I can't believe I obvious it was so is that there are the people who wrote the test is that their fault no it's the the students over complicating everything and thinking that it the answer is really really really complicated look at this one there are a huge number of past papers real IELTS tests that look like this a huge number one goes up one goes down one stays the same one might fluctuate and whenever you show this to most students they try to interpret it in a really complicated way because they don't have the confidence just to give the really really simple straightforward answer which nine times out of ten that's the answer also think about is it dynamic or is it static a dynamic chart is a chart or a data source over time from 2000 to 2006 from 2000 to 2003 that didn't work very well and from 2000 to 2018 so the dynamic data it's changes over time if it's changes over time most of the time it's going to be the general trends from this point to this point what happened from here to here it increased what happened from here to here it decreased what happened from here to here it stayed the same again really really straightforward really really simple if it is not dynamic so it is there's no time where you're comparing different times then it can be a little bit more complicated we might do another lesson on static charts and maybe this week or next week number six if you could only say two things or three things or four things I bug the data what would be that restriction that will force you to find the key features because if you're looking at everything and you're trying to talk about everything then it's the same as talking about nothing but if you are trying to just find it two or three or four real key features the most important bits of data then you're gonna do much better okay so one place you can go to practice these is the news so journalists newspaper reporters do this every single day every single day newspaper reporters journalists get sent massive amounts of data in reports and research and they have to create a you know like a 500 word article out of that there's no way that they can write every single piece of data so what do they do normally the headline is the key feature the number-one thing that they want to report maybe in the body of the article there might be you know two or three other key features but if you look at most of these articles you will find that the reporter has actively looked at the data analyzed it and picked out the key features so for example this is today climate report so this is a scientific report go up here you'll see starting off 1883 up until to work on over like a hundred and fifty years worth of data is in this chart do you think that this this article that's maybe 500 words long is reporting all of this data no they're just looking at the most important features and reporting that because people can't process that amount of data and so a really good way to practice task 1 features and identifying them is just go and read the news each day it doesn't have to be the BBC News but any newspaper in English go to that and look at the technology news or the science news and you will see I don't know why it went to that might get taken off the air if we show TV program that and but every single day every newspaper in the world reports on studies and research and everything and you can go and have a look and that's a great way to improve not only your task one academic your feature reporting but also your vocabulary your reading skills your grammar your general English everything hopefully you find that useful and if you have let me know what we can do is we can download this I probably shouldn't have done all this but and but what we can do is I can download this as a PDF if you want me to do that and then I can give you the PDF so you can review it and let me know in the comments and if enough of you want that I will download it and I'll put a link in the comments and but if nobody wants it I'll not do it and so let me know thank you very much guys hope that you find that useful and if you need help with your IELTS preparation go to my website IELTS advantage com if you need help with your preparation if you want me to help you whether personally we do have options to help you with that send me an email chris at il-2 Vantage comm if you've enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up subscribe because we'll be doing more of these we'd normally do by three times a week and so we'll be doing another one on Friday thank you very much guys hope that you found that useful see you again soon bye-bye

Channel: IELTS Advantage

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Keywords: IELTS, IELTS Advantage, IELTS Test, English, Pronunciation, live lesson, Band 7, subscribe, www.ieltsadvantage.com, IELTS Writing, Chris Pell, lesson, IELTS listening, Practice tests, tips, ielts listening, international english language testing system, ielts speaking, grammar, listening, ielts tips, In this lesson, Writing Task 1 Academic- Choosing Key Features, Choosing Key Features, IELTS Writing Task 1

Id: esVd0749hts

Length: 18min 5sec (1085 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 03 2018