How to Describe Complex Tables (Academic Part 1)
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Hey everybody, this is Ellen and I'm back with another tutorial, another writing tutorial. This time I decided to give my two cents about Task 1, specifically for academic. There's so much information out there about Task 1 that I thought I would try to give you guys something that I at least haven't seen a lot of. So specifically I wanted to talk about tables.

Now, a little bit of the good news and the bad news with the tables. I'll start with the bad news first. The bad news is, is I hate them. They're my least favorite task one.

partially because I'm a really visual person and it's really easy for me to say when I see a line graph or a bar chart or a pie chart it's really easy for me to say oh yeah well that's the highest that's the lowest this is you know the biggest change etc etc but when you're looking at a table that information becomes much harder to distinguish so

I personally, when I am either grading a task 1 or if I'm trying to write my own kind of sample for it, which I do from time to time, I find tables the hardest. So I don't know if you agree with me, maybe you do, maybe you think they're easy. If you do, wonderful. Tell us your secret.

So that's the bad news. The good news is is that they don't really show up a lot in the exam based on all the information that I hear from my students from Examiners who I speak to they're not the most common And when they do appear they usually appear in conjunction with some other

type of diagram. So it could be, for example, a bar chart with this really minor, minimal sort of table that just sort of supplements information, which makes it a lot easier. That said, occasionally you do get a table that is just there on its own.

And what I wanted to talk to you all about today specifically was two types of tables: tables with really little information and tables with tons of information. Both of these types present some really different challenges. The tables with really little information presents the challenge where

test takers then say well gosh you know how can I possibly write 150 words when there's so little data how can I possibly expand my answer in order to reach a word minimum on the other hand you have these tables sometimes 30 or even sometimes 40 pieces of information and people say wow how can I possibly group this information together how can I

include all the key points when I can't even locate them because they're all in numerical form and it just becomes really complicated. Well, that's the goal of this tutorial to help you and guide you with how you can deal with some of these challenges.

Okay, so you can see that I have up here a really really simple table I would love to tell you where I found it. I can't because I don't know what the source is It's just one of the tables I found on the internet Used a bunch of times in a bunch of different sites. So if you made this

But a type table somebody out there I would love to give you credit, but I don't know who you are so let's just assume I'm giving the creator of this table some credit, okay? so the first thing that creates a challenge here is

least from my experience is not only that there's very few there's very few pieces of data here specifically we have what is it seven we have seven pieces of data okay but what I find is that a lot of you diligent IELTS students you try really hard to learn this relevant IELTS academic task one

vocabulary where you're talking about increases and you're talking about decreases and a sudden rise or dramatic fall or you know a threefold increase and then suddenly you get to something like this and you can't use any of that language why because we're not talking about any increases any decreases any falls or any rises it's what we call a static diagram

So what that means is that you're going to have to refer to some other vocabulary, which is also really necessary for IELTS, which is more the vocabulary of comparison. Okay? So in other words, saying that something is twice as high as something else or something is...

four times higher than something else. So this is the kind of language you're going to use rather than this language of movement like increases, decreases, threefold and so forth. Okay, so I actually went ahead and I did a model for this. I may or may not share it. I'm not sure but I

What I found is that my model was about 161 words. Could I have beefed it up a little more? Yeah, I could have. But I think it's pretty indicative of what you could do for this. So let's start.

with how I approached it. First of all, you need to understand what you're looking at. One thing that I find in a lot of test takers task ones is they misunderstand this. Okay, all households. So what they fail to realize is that this is essentially the average of all of this.

And that's an important piece of information because this is kind of on its own. A lot of people end up writing responses where they take this as a seventh category and it really isn't. Like I said, it's just the average of all of these figures. And that's an important distinction to make.

So we've talked a little bit about the vocabulary, we've talked a little bit about making sure you understand this. Now when you have only six pieces, well in this case seven pieces of information, it's pretty clear that you're going to write about every single one of them. So first of all I would have to say that when we're talking about key information and those of you who have listened to my

Essay corrections you'll hear me sometimes talk about key pieces of information Well because there's so little happening here everything is key But generally speaking the key pieces of information are all of your categories so all of these categories here are

the family types every single one of them is a key piece of information so you're absolutely going to have to refer to each one you don't want to leave a single one out similarly all of this is also key pieces of information but generally what I'm what I want you to understand is that all of your categories on the outside

Here on this frame those are always your key pieces of information You don't have to talk in detail about every single one if you've got a lot But the categories at the very least should be mentioned by name if nothing else, okay, so um What I did here all right all right. I'll share my at least my introduction my overview there we go and

Okay, so the table provides information regarding the percentages of people living in poverty divided into different household types. Overall, single people living with or without children have the highest rates of poverty. So why did I say this? Single people living with or without children? Because I'm referring to this piece of data here, sole parent, okay? And single, no children.

Alright, that's why I phrase it like that. So you can see that I've done a lot of rephrasing of the words here, but not so much that it's something totally different, but certainly using some synonyms and showing my ability to use some synonyms.

The other thing that I want to point your attention out to is the tense I used. Now, there is absolutely no information about when this table is happening, and so I've decided to use the present tense. And that's okay. You can do that if there's absolutely no mention of the time.

you can use the past tense. The point is, is you have to be consistent. There should be no flip-flopping of tenses. So if you started it with the present tense, continue with the present tense. And again, if you started it with the past, just be consistent and use the past tense. Okay? So, what I then did in this, and this is what I suggest here, is starting with this. Since you've understood that this is your average,

Okay, I start with that and then I use it as like my frame of reference throughout you have to mention this This is really important. You can even see that it's in bold What I then decided to do now I didn't have to start with this but I chose to since it was the average what I then decided to do was I just started decided to talk about sole parents and

Okay at 21% and then I refer back to the whole all the households Saying that this is almost double this figure is almost double this figure Okay, and then I go on to talk about single no children saying that it's close behind this figure okay, but with two less two percent less and

Then where do we go? The obvious choice is to talk about couples with children. Now that's one way to do it and when I did my little model, that's how I chose to do it. You didn't have to. In fact, what you could have done here is you could have talked about the lowest

Alright, which is these two figures here. I just decided for simplicity just to go from high to low. Like I said, you don't have to. You could have then talked about these middle ones and you'll see why I did it like this though.

So I talked about couples with children and the thing that I found really interesting is how close it is to the average for all households. Okay, so I even used a linking word like surprisingly 12% of couples with children are also under the poverty line with a total of 933,000 people. So you can see that these figures are there and they're in

in parentheses so you could decide to pick and choose when and if you would want to include them I did include them not throughout my answer but I kind of picked a few here and there I'd say maybe three times I use these which is okay could you do more yeah but

Yeah, I guess you could use them for each of the figures that you decide to talk about. But like I said, I decided to refer to these numbers maybe like three times. Okay?

So then I did something for the rest of the answer that I think will help really not only with this particular one but with lots of different types of task ones is I decided to group. I decided to start

my next paragraph with a sentence like this: "The remaining categories all have less than 10% poor." Okay? So what is that? It's essentially an introductory sentence and you're going to need to use things like this, like I said before, to beef up your answer. So then you can give specific data. So that's when I then started talking about couples with no children,

Then I talked about I grouped these guys together too So I grouped the single aged with the aged couples together Saying that the lowest figures for poverty were found in the elderly or are found in the elderly specifically

6% of single-aged people are under the poverty line whereas 4% of aged couples live in poverty. Okay, so if you do it like this and you provide some of this comparison, some of this grouping using some introductory sentences at the start of a new paragraph, then you can really give a lot more meat to your answer. Okay?

So, since we've talked about how to deal with a simple table, I now want to look at a complex table. Again, I don't remember where I got this from. If you created this table, then thank you very much. I give you credit.

So, let's take a look at this. When I first saw this, I was so overwhelmed just looking at all these numbers. If you look at it, it is 42 pieces of data. Look, you've got

7 each categories and then you have six categories of activity okay so 42 pieces of data which is really overwhelming okay so you may ask yourself but how on earth am I going to organize this well like I said I'm a really visual person so looking at this I found it very challenging so take a look at what I did

I actually created a bar chart out of the data that was in the table.

Now, I did this really just to help me kind of get a handle on this information and really see where the trends are because like I said before, when you look at 42 pieces of information, you may have no idea where to start. So, suddenly when I saw it like this, it just made so much more sense to me. Now, obviously you're not going to be able to do this the day of your exam.

You're not going to be able to just sit there and construct a bar chart, but it will at least give you an idea that, you know what, it's really not that overwhelming. All you have to look for is trends and similarities in the numbers. When you look at it like this and it becomes super clear that watching videos is the most popular,

Cinema is consistently the lowest but also pretty low is socializing with four or more people and then you've got different things happening with these activities now

One of the things I talked about in the simple table is how important it is to group information. Well, if you look at the actual activities themselves, you can group them in terms of not numbers necessarily, but in terms of activity itself. So look at what I mean.

you've got two different activities here that deal with socializing. What differs is how many people you're socializing with. Similarly, you've got two different activities that deal with exercise. Okay? And...

watching TV videos is kind of similar to going to the cinema okay so suddenly you've taken your six categories and you can effectively reduce them to three but then talking about how those figures differ okay so let's take a look again at that bar chart

So, if I were now going to describe this, I would talk about watching TV and TV videos and cinema. I would put them together. I would say this was clearly the most popular among all the age groups with the exception of people in their 40s, whereas cinema was consistently the least popular with less than 50 for each category. Okay?

Now, of course, you're also going to want to talk about the individual age groups. So you'll mention that teenagers participate in this activity the most, followed by people in their 70s. And we already talked about people in their 40s. And you can say that it's pretty similar here as well, right? So the teenagers engaged in this activity the most, followed by people in their 70s, okay, and in their 20s as well.

so you don't have to go into a ton of detail you don't have to talk about

those kind of middle figures. Like I said, because you're certainly not going to talk about 42 pieces of information. So you've talked about the teens, you've talked about people in their 70s, so that's one, two, three, four. You've talked about this, that's five pieces of information. And you can pretty much be done with it, okay? So you can be done with these two categories. So then you have a decision to make. Say, okay, well, what do I talk about next?

As far as my logic is concerned, I would probably go to the exercise category since you've got this figure that really stands out right here. Maybe it'll be clear if I show it to you on the table.

Okay, so here it is. And look at that. It's the only place other than watching TV and videos that you see this large number right there. Okay, so that's the kind of thing you might want to circle on your exam paper. That's probably a good habit to get into as well. You know, maybe underline some things, circle some things so that they really stand out.

So that's probably what I would do first. Assuming that we've talked about TV videos and cinema, I would then describe the exercise preferences. So exercise is a very popular activity among various age groups. Group exercise fares the best for those who are in their teens.

450 hours per year and then I would say that this figure declines considerably for each of the following age groups with people in their 60s and 70s not participating in group exercise at all. In contrast, individual exercise is most popular with

people in their 30s and 40s okay and then I would mention maybe another figure there as well either one of the lows or maybe say that it's also very popular with teens and people in their 70s interestingly enough so let's take a look now at the figures for socializing let's look at the little bar chart I created to help us with this

Okay, so when you look at it here, it's pretty clear that for people in their teens and 20s, socializing in a group of four or more was really popular, but then for everybody else, it just totally was less popular, like almost not at all. In contrast, socializing with fewer than four people was popular, except, of course, for that 20 and under group or

or twenties and under group I should say okay so again you're going to want to make some analyses there as well so what you want to remember in something like this is that you don't have to give all of these pieces of information you do have to group you absolutely have to group some of them together you won't mention

all seven of these for each category. You'll pick the most important ones. You also may want to use ranges. So say for example, if we're talking about the TV and video one, you could have talked about

teenagers are at 1200 and people in their 70s are at 1100 and everyone else was either at 700 and below or you could say that everyone else was between

What figure is that? 400 and 700. So this way you've included everybody. I'm a huge fan of ranges, especially when you have things like this. Okay? Another place where you could have used a range was here. Okay? So you could say if you're talking about the socializing for people, socializing with four people or less,

you could write a sentence like this. You could say that, um,

People in their 30s spent 300 hours socializing with four or fewer people. The lowest figures were found for people in their teens and 20s at 150 and the remaining groups were between these two figures. Okay, so you're not burdening your answer with too too too many pieces of data yet at the same time you are giving all the important features that you need to talk about.

Okay, so that's how I deal with really simple tables as well as really difficult tables. I hope you've found this information helpful. If you have any questions, please feel free to write us here at IELTSpodcast.com. Also, take a look at the online course. See if it's something that...

you would be able to sign up for. Tons of information, not just on task one, but of course on task two as well. And there's also the essay corrections that you can sign up for where we will happily correct your essays and return them to you with lots of feedback and lots of advice on how to get the score you need. Okay? So keep on writing. Good luck to all of you. Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening to IELTSpodcast.com.