hi there it's asiya and in this video i'd
like to share with you my top tips for ielts academic writing task 1 which i hope will help you
write better answers and achieve a higher score before we begin i just wanted to check if you've
seen my new step-by-step ielts writing tutorial where you can write your task 1 and task 2 answers
together with me in this class i'll teach you the fundamentals of ielts writing and show you how to
write high scoring answers step by step all the details are in the video description and now let's
get started my first tip is avoid providing too many details in your report to explain what
i mean let me show you a task here it is the charts below show the average consumption
of three nutrients by adults in the uk all these nutrients may be unhealthy if eaten
too much and then we see three pie charts sodium saturated fat and added sugar on each chart
we can see what proportion of this nutrient people consume with each meal breakfast
lunch dinner snacks for example sodium people eat 13 of sodium with breakfast
28 with lunch 42 with dinner and so on so what i'm doing now is i'm providing every
detail i'm describing every number doing that in your report is wrong it will limit your
score the task is to summarize the information so let me give you an example to
illustrate my point this is a bad example a typical breakfast contains 13 of the daily
intake of sodium 16 of saturated fat and 16 of added sugar what i did here is i described
every number i could find on those childs this is a bad idea what you should do instead
is find the key trends differences or stages when you look at your data you need to analyze
them and explain what they mean what stands behind the data so if we continue talking about our
breakfast a much better example would be this a typical breakfast is the lightest meal
of the day which contains between 13 and 16 of each nutrient so here i used the same data
but i analyzed them i explained what they mean the breakfast is the lightest meal of the day
and then i supported my description with figures which contains between 13 and 16 of each
nutrient so i provided just enough detail to support my statement but not more and here
is my next tip support your description with figures just like in our previous example there
is a statement and then some figures to support it here is another example out of all the meals
dinner contains the largest proportions of sodium and saturated fat 42 and 39 of daily intake
respectively again i'm not just saying dinner contains 42 of sodium because that means nothing
i say that it contains the highest proportion which is much more meaningful and then i support
my statement with the exact number and the word respectively means that numbers come in the same
order as things were mentioned so 42 is sodium and 39 and saturated fat it's a really useful
word for task one okay the next tip is describe data correctly it's very easy to make a simple
mistake of reporting the wrong number but you lose marks for that so be careful next write an
overview i know the task doesn't say that you must write an overview but you must an
overview is a very short summary of the main things you've learned from the task you just need
to write one or two sentences without any details without any numbers so here is the overview for
this task overall the first two meals of the day eaten by adults in the uk are relatively balanced
and healthy whereas dinner contains the most sodium and saturated fat most of
the added sugar is in snack foods you see even without seeing those charts
we can already say what this task was about so this is the overview and by the way foods
it's not a mistake when you talk about different kinds of food you can say foods and if you'd
like to see the full sample answer for this task i will link the video in the description use
the correct tense that's my next tip it's very easy to report the information in the wrong
tense because you have so many things to think about but that's a significant mistake so pay
attention to that let's have a look at some tasks so in the task with pie charts we don't have any
dates so everything is in the present and we use mainly the present simple tense breakfast contains
people eat and so on now this one a bar chart here we have three time periods 2003 2006 and
2013.
So here everything is in the past and you need to use the past tenses to present the
information finally we have two maps a sleep town center now so that's the present the present
tense and plant development so that's about the future there are actually two ways to talk about
a plant development you can say the plant proposes the construction of a circular road so we use
the present simple tense to talk about the future and another one a new shopping center will
be built so that's the future simple tense will be built is the passive voice we don't
know who's gonna build it it's not important it will be built by someone so in your report
it's best to use a combination of both tenses next have at least two body paragraphs in your report
if you have two maps in your task it's quite logical to think that you will have two body
paragraphs but even if you have one big chart or a diagram you still need to have at
least two body paragraphs you may have three next don't write a conclusion you don't
need it in your task one you need it in task two in task one writing a conclusion is a waste of
time so spend this time on writing a good overview and don't give your opinion you can analyze the
data but you shouldn't say what you personally think about it so here are some examples of things
you should not say in task 1.
