Your 20 Minute Academic Task 1 Crash Course
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You are now listening to the IELTS podcast. Learn from tutors and ex-examiners who are masters of IELTS preparation. Your host, Ben Worthington. Your 20-minute academic IELTS Task 1 crash course. Hi there, my name is Ben Worthington and in this tutorial we are going to go over

at a high level the skills you need and how to get them for your IELTS academic task one describe graph describe a bar chart describe a natural process describe a table describe a map all of these graphics that we have to describe in our academic task one report

The outline for this tutorial was basically me having a glance at our Academic Task 1 course

and looking at all the contents in that course and I was thinking, right, I can talk about that for a few minutes, that for a few minutes. So it's a very complete, high level, very practical, as always, tutorial to get you up and running with IELTS Academic Task 1. Now this is completely free. If you do get some value from this, I'm asking you a small favor in return.

because it's completely free and you get some value from it if you did get some value from it, sorry please just share it with a friend post it on the socials email it to a friend whatever it just helps us help more people so you're probably aware of what you need to be doing you need to be describing visual data graphs, charts, tables and whatnot so I'm going to blast through this very quickly

Grab a pen. It's going to be incredibly valuable. You need to understand the data and This isn't just identifying the key trends the differences the overall patterns, but it's also looking at the units making sure you don't get millimeters confused with liters or kilometers confused with meters just looking at the units and

I want you to once told me a good method and it's basically to step back, squint your eyes and then you get a blurred overview and then those are the sort of like the blurred parts, the bits that stick out. Those are the ones you're going to be talking about for the main sort of like key trends. Structure your response. You can start with an introduction that paraphrases the task description.

followed by an overview. It's important we get the overview probably in the second sentence. I used to teach my students to put the overview at the end but Ellen, our XIL examiner, she came up with a better way which was putting it in the second sentence. This way you get it out of the way and there's no chance of you forgetting it, forgetting to include it which would cost you points.

Next one, use appropriate vocabulary. We're going to go into this in more detail in a second, but it goes back to what I was saying about not only using the correct units, but also are you using language of change when it's a bar chart? Sorry, when it's a pie chart. Are you using fractions and proportions for the pie chart? Are you using...

the correct tense when you're comparing two different time frames. All of this is important. Now then, let's go into looking at choosing what to write about. This is probably one of the most frequent challenges students face when they are doing Academic Task 1, especially the student who is doing International Relations or is studying

history or geography or something like that and they don't really get that much exposure to graphs and charts as compared to say an engineering student or maybe even a medical student

So you really need to brush up on your charts. I think the best examples of this are at TheEconomist.com. I think it's called Daily Chart. Just put it into Google and you'll see every day they're just looking at a different chart. And it's like, whereas in this month it was 20,000 barrels of oil, in this month it was 30 barrels of oil, and then it grew to 60 barrels of oil, and so on and so forth. But The Economist, The Economist, sorry,

is one of the best resources I've ever seen for this. So let's have a look at a quick practical roadmap. We identify the key points. This forces you or you can do it the other way around, but you need to include the superlative because if you include the superlative, the maximums and the minimums, then you are going to use another grammar structure which will help you with the grammatical range and accuracy criteria.

so the highest point on the chart is the largest section of the of the pie chart is the lowest point of the chart or the lowest amount of sales is and so on and so forth of the highest point of growth is the highest rate of change was between 2014 and 2025 for example next point we want to prioritize clarity

Okay, so clarity is lost when we are going through the chart in a list style. In 1999, it was 30%. Sorry, in 1999, it was 30%. In 2000, it was 31%. In 2003, it was 34%. And so on and so forth. This is just not clear. A good...

A good way around this is to group the data. This is a key skill to group the data. So we're grouping maybe the smallest ones, then the largest ones. The next one, consider your audience. In this case, obviously, it's the IELTS examiner. So this means we want to present our ideas logically and coherently.

Now a good tip here is when we've got a chronological chart which starts at say like let's say the year 2000 and finishes in 2024 it would be bizarre to start off at 2010 and then mention 2005 and then go back to 2024 for example. Obviously it would be 10 times more logical just to work through the graph chronologically given an overview

and then maybe group sort of like the lowest points in the chart were 2010, 2012, and 2015 and the highest points were X, Y, Z and then in this way although it might go against what I just said about chronologically going through the data

We've still grouped the data, but we did acknowledge the chronological aspect of the chart in the previous sentence, and now we go into more detail by just grouping it together to get a better overview. Sentence structures. Now, in the course, we give you quite a comprehensive list of the different sentence structures you need and how to include them

in your framework how to include them in the framework that we give you to just speed up the whole entire writing process so some of these sentences include simple sentences which might seem a bit bizarre but we all know it's a variance for the variety of sentence structures we need short medium and long sentences this makes it interesting to read if it's all long

sentences and it's not grammatically perfect and even if it is grammatically perfect it still feels like you've got a big pair of wellies on and you're going through a very muddy field and you're just trying to make progress whereas we may if we put that variety in there then we're kind of just like gliding through like a sailboat in the America's Cup just cruising through and it just makes it that little bit more stylistically

appealing, a stylistically better read and then we can mix in with those long sentences compound sentences and complex sentences just to add that depth also we want to use complex structures possibly the conditionals definitely the passive constructions if we're using passive constructions now the focus is on the process rather than the actual doer

and some authors of academic writing absolutely hate the passive construction because sometimes it's not clear whereas with the IELTS you could argue it's not clear however this is IELTS we want to use a range of structures to get that band 7 or higher

And the passive is going to help us here, especially for a natural process or a process chart where we're describing maybe, I don't know, the extraction of oil, the process there, or recycling, or the water cycle, whichever process is in front of us, using the passive structure will help us. Now, again, and I say this for the students' violence writing task two as well,

What you want to do is get feedback. Get feedback on your work. Figure out the top errors, the most common errors that you are consistently making. Then you make an error list. Then the next time you write an academic task one, you check it for specific mistakes you know you have made in previous essay writing. And this just speeds up the whole process. It laser focuses your time,

So, it's basically quicker to spot the mistakes instead of just going through and sentence by sentence looking for every grammatical mistake that you are aware of. You just look for the ones that you consistently make and you fix them. And this way, the examiner is not going to have to correct your work.

right then some other useful valuable techniques to describe data we need to compare and contrast and a great way to do this is use whereas while in 2012 production was at an all-time low in 2019 it's skyrocketed to the maximum across the whole time period reaching 20,000 units a day

okay whereas while also for trends we need the language of change increasing dramatically skyrocketed to fell dramatically to now what I see a lot of students do is using this vocabulary for a pie chart

and this is the equivalent of a train crash because we've used the wrong vocabulary so if we say it see a dynamic chart where it's moving up and down over a period of time then we can use increasing dramatically falling or plummeting quickly or whatever we can use this language of change where if it's a bar chart a pie chart we probably won't need to use them definitely not in a pie chart quantify the changes

okay quantify the changes it fell by 2,000 barrels it fell by 20 units it increased by 30% it increased by roughly 40% it almost doubled it's three times that of the previous year all of these structures are incredibly useful because they increase the variety

and the helpers move towards that goal of giving an overall picture and it's easier to understand if you say production was at 20,000 and then it increased and reached 80,000 that's okay but if I said it increased four times to reach or it quadrupled to reach 80,000 the following year that's far a far richer idea a far richer description

cohesion and coherence so we need to link these ideas and link it all so this is what I was saying before about grouping so we group the smallest ones we group the largest ones and then we say and then in the following year okay we use connectors lexical resource

Again, this is what I was saying before, you know, using the different structures increased by three, triple that of the previous years. It just helps you avoid the repetition and it helps you avoid going through that horrible process of listing every data point and boring the examiner to death. Okay.

task achievement make sure that you've mentioned most of the data points you don't have to list them but the ones that you haven't included make sure that they're at least in a group you know the smallest three were geography PE and history with 3.3 percent 5 percent and 8 percent respectively what tenses do we use again all of these points that I'm mentioning

sentence structures, variety, all of this these are all modules in the course so this is just a high level view so what tenses do we use? past tense for describing completed actions or past events we use the present tense when the charts when it's showing current data or habitual actions we use the future tense obviously when the chart shows a forecast I see a lot of essays

A lot of reports and the chart shows 2030 and the students still writing in the present tense and we should be using tenses like whereas in 2030 it is predicted to rise to 80 kilograms and then it will fall back down to 50 by the year 2035. What exercises can you do to improve your writing?

One of my favorites would be going to -- especially for a self-study student, one of my favorites would be to go to The Economist, Daily Chat, as I mentioned at the beginning, and copy, pen and paper. Look what's on the screen.

Copy, pen and paper, write it out, analyze it, check it. If there's new structures in there, try playing with those structures. And then when you get better, you can look at a sentence, cover it up and try to write it from memory. Do about three or four of these every single day and within a week, two weeks, you'll see a vast improvement in your writing.

Next point, get some feedback. You can use our AI Essay Checking tool to get some feedback. It'll look at the structure, the grammar. It'll give you an estimated score. It's completely free. If you need to improve faster, then you can upgrade, get the premium one, and that will help you improve faster because it's looking at more data points. Instead of taking maybe 10 seconds, it takes 30 seconds for you to get your feedback.

So it takes a little bit longer, but the amount of detail in that extended feedback is far more valuable. Also, just make a note and log your improvements and your errors, as I said before. Now, traditionally, teachers, when they look at your work,

Most of the good parts go unnoticed. This is the failure of the tutor because the tutor might be a native English speaker, it's not going to stand out to them that you did it perfectly.

and they will probably ignore it and they'll just focus in on all the errors and that's why it's so disheartening with standard corrections when you get your work back and it's just full of red ink and this is wrong, I don't understand and question marks and all of this and all the beautiful features, all the advanced features that you did correctly go completely unnoticed

and it's so rotten it's so rotten this is why when I do my essay corrections I always start with praising the student well done for taking action a lot of students never even write an essay oh this structure is amazing

and you should do the same with your own essay correction you know you're reviewing it and you're like ah well done well done ben you used a comp a comparison there you know so i used to say to my students just make a list of all the errors but nowadays i say um well early on i realized when i was getting feedback on writing i was doing i was like you just ripped me to shreds and i feel terrible now i would never do this when i'm teaching uh so

What I'm saying is when you're getting the feedback and you see, oh, I did this well, I did this well, write it down because then you're more likely to do it again. Now, the final part is kind of already covered it. I'm just going to go into a little bit more detail now is graph vocabulary for part one. Okay, we need to be familiar with the adjectives and the verbs like rise, fall, surge, decline, grow, drop, plummet. Side note here.

And I almost made this mistake, I think, earlier on. But I remember once at a Christmas dinner and my family member, she said, oh, it's very epic. And I've learned nowadays not to correct family members at family events. It doesn't go down well. But she said very epic. And this is just an absolute blunder because if it's epic, it's the pinnacle. It's already the maximum. So you can't say it's the very maximum.

It's not accurate and it shows a lack of command of the English language. Of course, if you're a non-native English speaker, you can probably get away with it, but at higher levels, and especially for native language users, it doesn't come across as that educated.

I'm saying this because if you're using words like "it skyrocketed" and then you said "it absolutely skyrocketed" the "absolutely" is a little bit redundant. "It skyrocketed quickly." Of course it's going to go quickly. It's a rocket! So just keep in mind which ones need the adverbs or the adjectives.

Next ones, stability and fluctuation, remain stable, level off, fluctuated. And this one we can modify, say fluctuated modestly, fluctuated wildly, because fluctuated, all it means is it just goes up and down or it changed. So we could add some detail to that one.

Descriptive adjectives: significant, dramatic, sharp, moderate, slight. These ones you need to use with caution as I just mentioned. You can't say it slightly skyrocketed. That's just absolutely redundant. You could say it increased sharply the following year. That's a great use of your vocabulary. Now, that's it. I promised you it was 20 minutes. We're now at 20 minutes 41 seconds.

And thank you very much for listening. If you got some value from this, you're going to get 10 times more value by checking out the course. And if you are a little bit lost and you want to improve quickly, then go to ieltspodcast.com, sign up to our newsletter. You get a free course there for how to use the AISA check-in. It just gets you up and running, gets you improving faster, gets you closer to that band seven.

That's it for me today. Have a beautiful day and good luck with your IELTS exam.