IELTS Writing Task 1: How to Describe a Bar Chart

hello my name's Liz and in this lesson I'm going to give you all the essential tips and techniques that you need to know to be successful with bar charts for IELTS writing task 1 we're going to look at each paragraph and I'm going to show you what information you need to put in each paragraph and how to write it this is the bar chart we're going to use for this lesson so let's have a look the chart shows the expenditure of two countries on consumer goods in 2010 IELTS will always give you a description of the chart and this is key information that you need to read to understand the meaning of your bar chart now when we look at the bar chart we can see that down the vertical axis here so at the side we've got all the different amounts of money that the two countries spend along the bottom so that's the horizontal axis we've got all the different types of consumer goods so we've got five different types of consumer goods we have cars computers books perfume and cameras and if we look further we can see that the two countries we've got one in blue and one in red we've got France and the UK so that is a bar chart for this lesson let's have a look at our paragraphs the first paragraph that you will need to write is your introduction then you will have something called an overview after that you've got two body paragraphs for the introduction we need to paraphrase this statement here so the information that IELTS give you we need to write it again in our own words for the introduction let me show you how to do that now and here is our introduction so let me show you how I wrote it now the first two words of the chart you can see it's the same I have not changed those words and I don't recommend that you should a chart is a chart a graph is a graph a table is a table you do not need to paraphrase every word because not all words can be paraphrased successfully in English so it is normal for a band score 9 to have some words the same so we've got the first two words we're going to keep them then we will take a look at the verb they say shows we can use illustrates you could also say gives information about they say the expenditure and I say the amount of money spent that's a very nice paraphrase they say that it is the expenditure of consumer goods so what I've done is I've kept that word that's the correct word it's an academic word I don't want to change it but I do add the number it's time to introduce the categories remember this is your introduction you want to introduce the information so the amount of money spent on five consumer goods and here you can see that I have given the list now it's very good to give a list of the categories but only if it's not too long so here we've got five if it is over eight maybe you don't want to do that and you just give the number but here I've given the list and I have used brackets and brackets are very useful in academic writing task 1 so that you can put data or information in them perfectly normal to use so we've got the list and then I say in France and the UK they say in two countries but again this is the introduction and I want to introduce these two countries so always try to give the names if you can in the UK and France in 2010 and of course the date very important because we must pay attention to the date to know the tents that we will use for writing this task 1 is there anything missing yes you can see down the side here that we've got some extra information so of course we want to paraphrase the information given by IELTS but we also want to look at the chart to see if there is any other information that we want to introduce and of course here we've got that all money is measured in pounds sterling so we need to write that in our introduction and we can write units are measured in pounds sterling and this is a very useful sentence to use because of course that is a passive tense which is very nice for the examiner so if you have interesting units for example pound sterling or a different currency then please put the measurement for your units in your introduction so that means the introduction is sometimes one sentence sometimes two sentences not longer it's the easiest paragraph to write in IELTS writing task 1 you should not make any mistakes with this so please make sure you practice that now let's move on and we'll have a look at the overview the overview is the most important paragraph in your IELTS writing task 1 this is the paragraph where you will collect all the key features and put them together an overview statement the examiner is looking for the overview if you have no overview you will not get above vanskor five for task achievement that's 25% of your marks if you have an overview that's one score six if you have a clear overview that's bands cross seven so your bands goal will go up depending on this overview so very important now before I show you how to write your overview let's have a look at what the key features are if you look at the chart you will see that in red is the UK and in blue is France and of course key features are all about the high points and the low points of your chart so if we look here for the red one that's UK we can see that most of the spending was on cars and also for France the blue one that's the same so both France and the UK spent most of their money on cars but if we look at the other end so the lower points for England the least amount of money was spent on perfume and for France it was cameras so those are key features is that any other key feature we can have yes and of course what you need to look at is very simple can you see more red or more blue so which country spent more money in total on the consumer goods and you can see that obviously there is more red so the UK spent more money than France so let's write the overview and here we've got the overview so let's have a look we start with the word overall because we want to show the reader to show the examiner that this is our overview this is a good technique to use because it means the examiner can easily find the overview and that helped us get a better band score so overall the expenditure of the UK was higher than that of France so this is our first key feature overall so taking the whole chart together which one was higher and you can see we're using a comparative overviews often usually have comparatives now we look at the next part this is quite a long sentence and it's connected with two linkers you're at Weill and compared to so let's have a look we've got both the French and the British so here i've changed it instead of giving the name of the country I'm using the nationality both the French and the British spent the most money on cars and here we've got a superlative so the highest the most while in the UK the least again this is a superlative the least amount of money was spent on perfume compared to cameras in France so in total in this overview we've got three key features we've got which one was higher than the other overall and we've got the most money spent and the least money spent three key features how many do you normally have well it's very rare to have only one I think that's almost impossible you are usually looking at two three or four key features occasionally five it depends on all the information in your chart or your table for example right so that's the overview now let's have a look at the body paragraphs this is one way to organize the body paragraphs now let me give you a rule first you must divide the body paragraphs you cannot have one body paragraph you are being tested on your organization and you use of paragraphs so that's 25% of your marks so if you have only one body paragraph it's going to be hard to get a good result for coherence and cohesion so I'm going to show you two different ways to organize the body paragraphs the most important thing is that it's logical so this is one possibility in body paragraph a we can have information about cars perfume and cameras and that is because we highlighted them as the highest and the lowest so that would be a very easy logical way to organize your writing and of course body paragraph B would have the other two categories so computers and books let me show you another way to organize it and here is the alternative the other way to organize your body paragraphs you can see I've got cars books and cameras together let's have a look why well cars you can see that the UK was higher than France the next one books that's the same the UK spent more money than France on books and cameras you can see the same you can see a significant difference between the spending and for body paragraph B we have the reverse so you can see that computers France spent more than England UK and perfume you can see again that France spent more than the UK on perfume so that is the other way to organize it which one is better they are both very good they will both give you a bang score nine for organization the most important thing is that it's logical and easy to follow for the reader now let's just have a quick look at how to write the body paragraph here we have two sample sentences for the category of cars and books so let's have a look you can see that we start off with a linker in terms of cars this is very nice because the reader immediately knows which category we're talking about in terms of cars the UK spent around four hundred and fifty thousand pounds so when you're writing your body paragraphs you need to take a look at the graph at the chart and you need to have a look this is the cars and here we've got the UK and you can see that it is between 400,000 and 500,000 we cannot write it was 450,000 because we cannot see exactly but we can see that it was around 400 or 50,000 pounds so they spent around 450 thousand pounds on this that means cars as opposed to this is a very nice linker to connect the information about France and England as opposed to exactly four hundred thousand pounds in France and you can see here we've got four hundred thousand pounds then we move on to books that's this one here and it says that the expenditure on books in the UK was higher than in France so we've got another comparative when you have a comparative like that you still need to give the numbers the data you cannot miss the data if your sentence is in the body paragraph are not supported by data you will get about basgier 5 for task achievement so that's another problem so please avoid that and always support your sentences with the numbers so you can see in this sentence what I've done is I've decided to put the numbers in brackets so that's an another bracket sentence and you can I've got about 400,000 and about 300,000 pounds respectively now respectively means that the order of the numbers follows the order in the sentence UK is first that number refers to the first one the second number refers to the second one so make sure you've got you the order of information right and also if you decide to use this method and have a sentence using respectively please don't put a long list of numbers because it becomes very difficult for the examiner to check he has to go through each number and check that everything is correct he will check every number that you write so those are two examples of complex sentences to describe the categories in the body paragraphs of course you have to write the others other things I want to point out and that's here just here you can see that I have written a symbol for the pound sign I have not written pound sterling and that's because I don't want to keep repeating words all the time it is fine in IELTS writing task 1 to use symbols you can use symbols for currencies and percentages and many other things so please make sure that you use that and when the examiner is counting the number of words you've written he will take that as one word because it's just a symbol with a number so that is the body paragraphs if you would like to see the full model so a bands gone 9 piece of writing for this chart then I will give you a link at the end of this video so you can have a look well that's all for this lesson if you found it useful please press like if you have questions then put them under the video or visit my blog on my blog there are many answers to questions about writing task 1 as well as all the other skills and IELTS so please take a look I will see you again in another I answer lesson you

Channel: IELTS Liz

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Keywords: #ielts bar chart, #ielts writing task 1, #ielts band score 9, #ielts tips, ielts writing tips, ielts writing task 1 tips, ielts charts

Id: E3U1Y1jgGls

Length: 18min 26sec (1106 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 30 2015