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IELTS writing - Task 1 report- describing numbers

Sunday, May 24, 2009 Posted by Dominic

Part of the skill in task 1 writing is dealing with numbers. With a pie chart, line graph or table you need be able to summarise the key details: to do this you need the language of numbers, as you should not simply write out all the numbers - it is a summarising task. This can be surprisingly complex to do as the figures in most task 1 exercises are not “simple figures” but rather more complex


How to describe differences accurately

40 is double is 20, but what about 42 and 20? Or 30 and 88?


These are the sort of “complex figures” you may need to describe in the exam and the examiner is looking for an accurate description of just this type of numbers. What you need to do is compare the numbers. Here is some helpful language for you: it is important that you have some variations here



Basic meaning

Variation

Variation

Variation

Variation

about

approximately

around

more or less


more than

over

just over



less than

under

just under

almost

nearly

exactly

precisely






So 40 is exactly double 20

42 is approximately double 20

30 is just over a third of 88



More language of numbers

To do this well, you need some mathematical language too:



simple language

simple figures

complex language

complex figures

double

40:80

approximately double the amount

40:82

twice

40:80

twice as many people

40:80

three times

30:90

over three times as many people

30:100

four times

50:200

nearly four times as many people

50:190

half

60:30

about half the amount of televisions

60:28

a third

120:40

precisely a third of the televisions

120:40

a quarter

160:40

almost a quarter of all televisions

160:35

a fifth

150:30

just over one fifth of all televisions

150:33

a fraction

100:8

a small fraction of students

1000:25

percentage

%

a significant percentage of students

65%

proportion

similar to %

a large proportion of students

80%

.


A test

How well can you work with number language? Try this brief quiz to find out.






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1 comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    Hi...

    Do u have sentence structures to describe chart or graph by kind? I also would like to know how to write comparison of data in case there are more than 2 graphs or charts in the exam. Thks.