 Chris here from IELTS Advantage and in this lesson what we're going to do is we're going to look at Task 1 Writing Academic, specifically bar charts and I'm going to write a band nine response with you. The best way to teach Task 1 Writing is to talk through with students what you are thinking, what you are doing while you are writing because Task 1 Academic is as much a thinking test as it is a writing test. So what we are going to do first is help you understand bar charts and data in general. Then we are going to show you a band nine structure and write along with you, write the whole response with you and talk you through exactly why I am writing each thing. We are also going to show you the different grammar, the different vocabulary that we specifically use for Task 1. And don't worry if you can't see everything clearly I'm going to zoom in on the different parts so that you can see it nice and clearly so don't moan in the comments. Okay the first thing we need to do is we need to understand so Task 1 Academic questions will always be in this format. You will get a paragraph normally just one sentence giving you information about the data. Then it will say summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features and make comparisons where relevant. It will always say this and this is important. And then it will give you the data. Now a lot of students are intimidated by bar charts and line graphs and pie charts and things like that. But the important thing to remember is a bar chart or a line graph or a pie chart is simply data, raw data that has been visualised to make it easier for you to understand. Bar charts are easier to understand than just a bunch of random numbers on a spreadsheet. So once you start thinking of it in that way I think it just makes it easier for you to understand and become less intimidating. So the first thing that we should do is read. So the bar chart shows the amount of foreign direct investment in India and China from 2014 to 2019. We don't need to know what foreign direct investment is. This is not asking for your opinion in any way. What it is asking you to do is understand the data and report the data accurately. You don't need to be an economist or a financial advisor to know what this is. Remember they are testing your ability to understand and report data. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features. So the keyword here is summarize. It does not say write everything that you see. You will only be writing between let's say 150 and 200 words which is not very much at all. So you're not going to be writing about every tiny little thing because it's asking you to select the most important things and then report them the main features. Another word for main features or words for main features is important things and to make comparisons where relevant and we'll come on to comparisons in a second. So the next thing we need to think about and this is important not only for understanding the data but for what you are going to write about is what is the person who made this chart. So this is a real chart. It comes from the financial times. The person at the financial times who put this together. What are they trying to show you? What is the point of this data? Well there are two points. Number one is to compare China and India so that people can look at this bar chart and understand the difference between China and India in terms of foreign direct investment. So that's the first purpose of this data. The purpose of the data why they made this chart is extremely important and you'll see that when we come on to write the essay. The second thing you probably noticed is it is showing a trend over time. It is showing what is happening to foreign direct investment over time for 2014 or 2014 sorry up to 2019. So these are the two main things that we are going to report because these are the main features of the data. So let's have a look at the data to help us understand. So if you get dates over time it is good to look for general trends. So for China and apologies this is my eight year old ruler from school. So if we look at the general trend in 2014 it goes down it stays kind of steady pops back up but in general it's going down all right. So China's foreign direct investment generally is going down. If we look at India it's fluctuating all right but it's pretty much staying the same doesn't go up much from 2014 to 2019 fluctuates a little bit that is the general trend. One of the key mistakes that I see a lot of students doing is to overthink the data but if we use a ruler it's going down and it's fluctuating but generally it's staying the same. That is the level of detail that the examiners are looking for in your answer does not need to be hugely complicated so don't make it complicated. Then we're also going to look at maybe the biggest the smallest as we can see China here has this massive amount of investment in 2018 so we're probably going to mention that and then if we look overall it's easy to see that overall throughout this period China has more foreign direct investment than India and that's where the comparisons come in. So you'll see when we start to write about this data those are the main things that we're going to write about but first let's look at the first part of our structure which is our introduction. The way that I find makes it much easier for students is to break everything up into bite-sized pieces. If you were to get a steak and a restaurant you wouldn't try and eat the whole steak or if you were to order a pizza you wouldn't try and shove the whole pizza into your mouth you would cut it up into bite-sized pieces so follow me now follow the steps that I use and then you will be able to replicate this yourself during your preparation and on test day. So the first thing we need to do with our introduction is simply look at this first paragraph which is normally one sentence and paraphrase it that's going to be our introduction that's going to be our first paragraph. Okay so how have I paraphrased this well I've used a number of synonyms words that mean the same thing but are different words so the bar chart the chart a bar chart is a bar chart there's no other real way of saying this so it is fine it just a copy and leave out the word bar the chart shows illustrates displays these are all synonyms that you could use the amount of the level of don't worry about repeating words like the or of there's no other way of using a definite article than to repeat it so foreign direct investment foreign investment is just money from outside of the country being invested into that country in one way or another so instead of foreign investment we have outside investment so I've changed the collocations of foreign direct investments to outside investment so it's best just to think of foreign direct investment and outside investment as two chunks of language we have repeated the word investment but we have changed the collocation now there's no other way of saying India India is India China is China we could say two countries in Asia or something like that but that's not very precise Asia is a massive continent so instead of just saying in India and China we said in the economies of and from to between and from 2014 to 2019 between 2014 and 2019 there will often be dates involved when it comes to these so now that we have completed our first sentence we can move on to the next paragraph your first paragraph will always normally be one sentence paraphrasing this and then we move on to the overview now you'll see a lot of discussion online saying that it's important that your overview is the second paragraph or the fourth paragraph to be honest it doesn't matter what matters is the quality of your overview it is impossible to get a seven or above without a good overview the position of it doesn't really matter quality of it does and we always start our overview with overall comma and then what we're going to do is look at this data and report between two and four of the most important features without reporting any specific data we're not going to talk about 80 billion or 100 billion we normally won't talk about dates this is just the two or three most obvious things about this data another way to think about it is if somebody put a gun to your head and said you can only tell me the two or three most important things about this data without giving me any specific data what would you say and for data over time normally that is going to be general trends generally what happens between the start and the end and if that you are comparing countries or entities something that is being compared normally you will throw in the most obvious comparison so as we've said before china steadily declined india fluctuated and china's capital expenditure flowing into their country was generally higher throughout the whole period than india remember we talked at the beginning about the importance of understanding the data the reason why it's so important is you are going to report these key features in your overview so my first sentence in my overview overall expenditure in china declined steadily so it declined and we're describing the type of decline which is a steady decline throughout the period so from 2014 to 2019 and then we compare that with india but fluctuated in india so we're comparing the two countries and we are showing the general trend so we have two general trends in here and a comparison so our second sentence in our overview paragraph despite this so despite the decline in foreign investment into china the total amount of money that flowed into china was higher than in india remember we were looking at the most obvious things about the data one of the most obvious things is it's bigger in china and this brings me on to an important point many people get lost in the data because they're looking for things that aren't there they are looking for complex things that will impress the examiner they think that if they write something as simple as this one goes down one fluctuates one is bigger than the other that they're not going to get high enough marks that this is a really hard test so it must be more complicated than this it's not they actually make the data very very obvious and simple only people who make it complicated are students because of this mindset that it is complex it isn't once you start to look at good sample answers and then look at the data you'll start to kick yourself and be like oh it's so obvious why didn't I spot that so stop looking for complicated things start looking for the most obvious straightforward simple things so well done we're nearly halfway through just by paraphrasing the first sentence and then spotting out the most obvious simple things and putting those into our overview we're nearly halfway there it's not as complicated as you think now our next two paragraphs are going to be our details paragraphs so as you can see in the overview we have no data we have no detailed information about the data that is what our two details paragraphs are going to include so we're going to get into the nitty gritty now and one thing you have to decide is how are you going to organize these two details paragraphs well for this particular bar graph it's very easy and obvious i remember this is a real bar graph from the financial times but again most of the questions are organized in this way that it's pretty obvious what you should do so what we're going to do is we're going to write about china in detail and then we're going to write about india in detail because one of the things that the examiner is looking for is are you organizing the information logically and it is very logical to talk about china and then talk about india now if we need to make comparisons we can do that within the paragraphs and i'll show you how you can do that so let's look at our first sentence in our third paragraph here the chinese economy received just under sorry i made a little mistake there 80 billion dollars in 2014 which fell to around 60 billion dollars in 2015 and 2016 don't do this in your real test i'm just doing this so i don't run out of paper i've shortened billion to bn but in the real test don't shorten things like that just write billion the dollar sign is fine you can keep that so what i've done is describe this part of the data from here to here in detail so i'm dividing the data into different chunks so it's very high here and then it moves down and stays around the same so i'm going to just write about that first again don't try and write about everything at once and you'll see that i have put just under 80 billion because if we put 80 billion that isn't accurate because it's not exactly 80 often these charts it will be difficult for you to understand exactly what the data is saying so it is better to just put just under or approximately or around i've put here around 60 billion as you can see it is around 60 billion but we don't know if it's exactly 60 okay so the next logical thing to do is to describe this dip down here and then this massive jump here and then it dips down back again so after a slight decrease in 2017 so it decreases slightly there was a massive resurgence to a high point of more than 100 billion in 2018 before receding so going back down to just over 40 billion in 2019 so you'll notice i haven't put the data in for 2017 i've just said after a slight decrease remember you're summarizing and selecting information you are not reporting every single data point that you see but this one is very important this is the high point so i am describing it and i'm really highlighting it by saying it's a high point it's 100 billion massive resurgence and then it drops back down to around 40 billion in 2019 and that's it done for the chinese now we move on to india so in 2014 foreign outlays into india's economy reached more than 20 billion so it was more than 20 billion then rose significantly to approximately 60 billion so this one's a little bit over this one's a little bit under so we're going to use the word approximately to describe both of them before falling back down to 2014 levels in 2017 so 2014 2017 are pretty much looking the same so we're going to say falling back so in 2018 there was another massive increase we've put dramatic increase here because they're pretty much doubles before returning to around 20 billion in 2019 so that's us done with india and finally in the same paragraph what i'm going to do is just compare more specific data between china and india so i'm going to do this so i've put 2015 was the only year india's levels of foreign investment exceeded china's with values of slightly over 60 billion and slightly below 60 billion respectively so this is a keyword that you want to understand and probably use in your task one academic responses respectively so remember one of the key features was the total amount for china was higher than india and this just goes into a little bit more detail on that and says you know in only in one year where india's slightly ahead of china the rest of it china exceeded and that's us done and as you can see by breaking it down into this structure it makes it much easier to understand and to do on test day let me just highlight some important vocabulary that you need to be aware of so you need to be able to describe data and general trends over time declined and how would you describe that decline fluctuated receding a resurgence it reached more than or reached less than it rose significantly or increased dramatically or dropped falling back dramatic increase values of slightly over so remember the task is just to simply describe data so you need to be aware of how to do that and then also remember that a huge part of this is describing data accurately so you're going to use words like around more than just over approximately just below around again slightly over so if you can simplify your understanding of the data follow this structure report the data accurately and use the correct grammar and vocabulary then you have a very very good chance of dramatically improving your score but there is another very common vocabulary mistake that lots of students make so one of our teachers michelle has put together a video for you how to avoid this common mistake and i else writing task one so go and watch that one now