 In this video I'm going to reveal to you the best and easiest way to write high-level examples. Good examples not only improve your IELTS score but they also make it easier to think of ideas and then develop those ideas into paragraphs. But most students really worry about examples and ask questions like, can I include data and surveys? How do I give personal examples? How do I give examples from my own experience? To help you I've taken seven real recent IELTS questions and I'm going to take you around where I live and give you seven real bad examples and seven real good examples to show you the difference between what is a good example and what is a bad example. So let's see how many you get correct and then I'll show you the easiest way at the end of the video. So the first question is in many places people are becoming interested in finding out about the history of the building they live in. What are the reasons for this? So I'm going to give you now two examples and I want you to think about those examples and think about which one is correct and which one is incorrect. Example one, I live in a house very close to a 12th century castle so I want to find out if any old things are buried there. Example two, many people in Ireland live close to buildings that date back centuries and wish to establish if there are any valuables buried on their property. Second question, in the future all cars will be driverless. The only people traveling inside will be passengers. Do you think the advantages are way the disadvantages? Example one, I own a Tesla and it is the best driving experience I've ever had. Example two, Teslas allow their drivers to engage autopilot which can accelerate, brake and steer autonomously freeing up the driver. Question three, many drink products contain high sugar levels which causes many health problems. A sugar tax should be applied to these products to encourage people to consume less sugar. Do you agree? Example one, people who drink Coca-Cola are 96% more likely to be overweight. Example two, in the UK regular Coke is more expensive than Coke Zero because the government hopes this will help reduce obesity. Question four, some people say that now is the best time in history to be alive. What is your opinion on this? Example one, the pandemic witnessed a 52% increase in working from home. Example two, during the pandemic millions of people started working from home which gave them more freedom and flexibility. Question five, plastic packaging is bad for the environment. What can be done by the government and individuals to solve this problem? Example one, in the UK the government has to install bins for people to put dog ways to into. Example two, in the UK the government has installed recycling bins so that people can separate their rubbish. Question six, young people who commit crimes should be treated the same as adults by the authorities. Do you agree or disagree? Example one, when I was growing up all teenagers would drink alcohol in the park every weekend. Example two, in the UK it is illegal to buy alcohol if under 18 but many British teenagers frequently break this law. In their advertising businesses nowadays usually emphasize that their products are new in some way. Why is this? Example one, IELTS VIP recently released VIP 2.0 to give their customers more control and flexibility over their learning at a much lower cost. Example two, software companies such as Microsoft update their products regularly and want to advertise these improvements so they can sell more products. I couldn't be bothered printing that out again. Okay, so example one here is wrong. The reason why it's wrong is it is too personal. Personal examples are okay but most students mess them up in this way by talking just about them only or their cousin or their sister or their brother or something like that. It's really about sample size. If I want to go and find out if things are buried there that doesn't mean that people in general want to do that as well. It's just what I want. If you compare that with the second example which is correct, many people in Ireland, so I live in Ireland so instead of saying I want to do this, I'm talking about people in my country or people in my area or city. Many people in Ireland live close to buildings that date back centuries. All that is true and anyone can check that out and wish to establish if there are any valuables buried on their property. So I'm stating something that has a bigger data set and is true and just gives far more authority to my answer and this is an easy way, an easy technique that any student can use. So think about your own personal experience, maybe you or a member of your family or a friend and then think how could I increase the sample size a bit so you can instead of saying me you could say people in your city or your country or if you are a doctor instead of saying me many doctors or if you are a software engineer and many software engineers or if you work for Google you know engineers at Google instead of me personally. For this next one the first example is wrong but not for the same reason as the previous one. It is a personal example but it's not because it's too personal it's because it's too vague. It's the best driving experience ever. You want to be specific as are as specific as possible because you want to relate this to the specific point that you are making. All right compare that with example two which is correct. Teslas allow their drivers to engage autopilot that is what the thing the system in Teslas is actually called which can accelerate, brake and steer autonomously. That's specifically what it does. Why am I mentioning this these things? Because that is a huge advantage. The question is asking me about do you think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. It is a huge benefit not to have to worry about acceleration or braking or steering. A massive massive benefit and that is far more specific and descriptive and linked to the main point than just saying it's awesome. It's amazing. Don't sound like an American. All right Americans if you ask them anything about anything it's awesome. Oh amazing wonderful be specific. But here for this question the first one is wrong. Why is it wrong? Well often students will add in just random statistics and surveys and studies and you know Cambridge University did this study. Cambridge University are not studying Coca-Cola. They're studying you know nuclear fusion and things like that or maybe they are I don't know. But you shouldn't just add in random statistics because like this one it not only is wrong it is dead wrong. People who drink Coca-Cola are 96 more likely to be overweight. This doesn't make any sense. It doesn't sound plausible. So when the examiner sees this one they know that you've just used this technique that they don't really like and two it doesn't make any sense. But what we can do is change it to something from our own experience. In the UK I buy Coke Zero. I like Coke Zero and the benefit of that also is it's cheaper because there's like a 20 percent tax on sugary drinks. So that is something that I know from my own experience which is much much much better than just throwing in these random statistics. Also the second reason why it is more correct is the question is asking about a sugar tax. Again your examples should be linked directly to your main points. Very similar to this one example one is wrong. The person doesn't know that there was a 52 percent increase in working from home. There was a massive increase but we don't know the exact percentage. But what we can do instead is put language in such as millions of people. I know that because there's like 80 million people in the UK. I'm sure there's different numbers in your country. But you can figure that out in your head. You know you could guess roughly how many people it was at hundreds of thousands wasn't millions. If you're in India it could be tens of millions hundreds of millions. Think of a more general number and put that in because it is true and you know that it's true. It's from your own experience. During the pandemic millions of people started working home which gave them more freedom and flexibility. That is very different from this percentage. It's also very different from you know during the pandemic I worked from home and I loved it because I could go and work in the park. But again this is not personal but it is from your own experience because if you were like me you were watching the news every day during the pandemic and you were aware that people were locked at home and had to work from home. In the UK the government has installed bins for people to put dog waste into. Wrong. Why is it wrong? Because the question doesn't ask about dog shit. The question is about plastic packaging. All right it's very very common. You might think this is funny. You might think oh I would never do that. It's very very common to see this in essays where students will write about the topic generally and just throw everything they know about the topic. So recycling putting stuff in bins oh I have a dog I put stuff in the bin I'll write that. You might think that that's crazy and I put it in there just for a joke but you see this all the time if you're an examiner. In the UK the government has installed recycling bins so that people can separate the rubbish. I know this because I put out my rubbish each week. We have a blue bin for plastics and a black bin for everything else. In your country you might have a different system but that's your own experience. But what I did not write down was I put my plastic bottles in the blue bin. It's too personal. In the UK I live in the UK so I'm going to put that in there. When I was growing up all teenagers would drink alcohol in the park every weekend. This is wrong for a couple of reasons. Number one it's too personal and number two it is not actually factually correct. Not all teenagers. A lot of them 80-90% of them but not all. Make sure that you're writing things that sound correct. Not every single teenager was getting drunk every weekend. In the UK it is illegal to buy alcohol if under 18. This is correct but many British teenagers frequently break this law. Many is very different from all. So we're stating something from our own experience. Every child, every person in the UK knows that you are not allowed to buy alcohol if you're under 18. That is from our own experience. And many teenagers break this law. Every single person in the UK knows a friend who got too drunk one weekend when they were teenagers. So this is correct. Now you might live in a country where alcohol is illegal completely or it's just not in your culture for teenagers to go and drink alcohol. Alcohol might be legal but just people don't do that really. You don't have to use this specific example. There are thousands of correct examples that you could use from your own experience. Don't look at this and think oh I'm wrong because I don't know anything about alcohol. Okay so this one isn't wrong per se but this one is just much better. Why? The VIP course only a few thousand people in the world are actually aware of that. So if you're writing something that is from your own experience but literally 99.999% of the world have no idea what it is that could cause problems. The examiner could read that and think is this person just made up you know ABC company and it doesn't really make any sense. If you wrote that in the real exam this one you probably would be okay. But what you want to do is add in things that most people in the world will be aware of. That will make your writing a lot more authoritative easy to understand. The examiner will understand it more but it's just easier for you to think. If you're thinking in those terms it's easier for you to think of Microsoft that you know everybody in the world basically knows about everybody has used those products or maybe not everybody but you know most people. It is just far easier for you to think of and for the examiner to understand and that's exactly what you want to do with every single part of the IELTS test especially the writing test. What's easy for you and what's easy for the examiner to understand. So here's the easiest system for generating very good examples and we're going to use this question to help us with the demonstration. Some old people struggle with the use of advanced technology. How can the elderly benefit from using advanced technologies? So the first thing we're going to do is think of a real example from our life experience. So this is not just things that have happened to us. This is things that we've experienced through our whole life things we know. And for this question I'm going to use my mom's iPhone. My mom is in her 70s and she recently got this iPhone and it has helped her and not changed her life completely but definitely benefited her. So my example is my mom's iPhone. Then we're going to ask ourselves if this idea is linked to the question. This is the most important thing. Is your example actually linked to the question your main idea? So my main idea is going to be that it helps my mom communicate. So she is elderly. This is advanced technology and it is benefiting her. So the answer to my question is yes. But if it was no if I looked at this idea and thought no actually this isn't relevant to the question it's not relevant to my main idea then we would just start again. We would go back up here think of a real example think of another one. Now often when you do this not every time but sometimes they can be too personal. So we're just going to ask ourselves this question. Is it too personal? If the answer is no then we're done and we can use this example. But because this is my mom's phone it is very personal it's just one person so we need to make it more general. So how can we do that? Instead of my mom my mom is an elderly person in the UK so we could say in the UK millions of elderly people use iPhones to FaceTime their loved ones. So as you can see by following this system it is actually very very easy to generate a real example that is relevant to a specific question and really helps you develop your main body paragraphs. But not only that you could actually use this during your idea generation phase so you could read this question and think who do I know that uses advanced technology and is elderly? My mom. What does she use it for? FaceTime. Why does she use FaceTime to communicate with people? How does that benefit her? She won't get lonely and if there's an emergency she can contact them easily. So what I've done there is just created a main idea and explanation and an example very very easily by following this system. So we've gone from the question down to the example in the UK millions of elderly people use iPhones to FaceTime their loved ones done. So that's the easiest way to write examples but examples are just a small part of your overall essay. So I'd recommend checking out this video which will show you how to write the whole essay.