[0:03]Hello, my name's Liz and in this lesson, I'm going to give you all the essential tips and techniques that you need to know to be successful with bar charts for IELTS Writing Task 1. We're going to look at each paragraph, and I'm going to show you what information you need to put in each paragraph and how to write it. This is the bar chart we're going to use for this lesson, so let's have a look. The chart shows the expenditure of two countries on consumer goods in 2010. IELTS will always give you a description of the chart, and this is key information that you need to read to understand the meaning of your bar chart. Now, when we look at the bar chart, we can see that down the vertical axis here, so at the side, we've got all the different amounts of money that the two countries spend. Along the bottom, so that's the horizontal axis, we've got all the different types of consumer goods. So we've got five different types of consumer goods: we have cars, computers, books, perfume, and cameras. And if we look further, we can see that the two countries, we've got one in blue and one in red, we've got France and the UK. So that is our bar chart for this lesson, let's have a look at our paragraphs. The first paragraph that you will need to write is your introduction. Then you will have something called an overview, after that you've got two body paragraphs. For the introduction, we need to paraphrase this statement here, so the information that IELTS gives you, we need to write it again in our own words for the introduction. Let me show you how to do that now. And here is our introduction, so let me show you how I wrote it. Now, the first two words, the chart, you can see it's the same, I have not changed those words, and I don't recommend that you should. A chart is a chart, a graph is a graph, a table is a table. You do not need to paraphrase every word, because not all words can be paraphrased successfully in English. So, it is normal for a Band Score 9 to have some words the same. So we've got the first two words, we're going to keep them. Then we will take a look at the verb, they say shows, we can use illustrates. You could also say gives information about.
[3:12]They say that it is the expenditure of consumer goods. So what I've done is I've kept that word, that's the correct word, it's an academic word, I don't want to change it, but I do add the number. It's time to introduce the categories. Remember this is your introduction, you want to introduce the information. So, the amount of money spent on five consumer goods, (cars, computers, books, perfume and cameras) in France and the UK. Now, it's very good to give a list of the categories, but only if it's not too long. So here we've got five, if it is over eight, maybe you don't want to do that and you just give the number. But here I've given the list, and I have used brackets. And brackets are very useful in academic writing task 1 so that you can put data or information in them. Perfectly normal to use. So we've got the list, and then I say in France and the UK. They say in two countries, but again, this is the introduction and I want to introduce these two countries, so always try to give the names if you can. In the UK and France in 2010. And of course the date, very important because we must pay attention to the date to know the tents that we will use for writing this task one. Is there anything missing? Yes. You can see down the side here that we've got some extra information. So of course we want to paraphrase the information given by IELTS, but we also want to look at the chart to see if there is any other information that we want to introduce. And of course here we've got that all money is measured in Pounds Sterling. So we need to write that in our introduction. And we can write units are measured in Pounds Sterling. And this is a very useful sentence to use because of course that is a passive tense which is very nice for the examiner. So if you have interesting units, for example, Pounds Sterling or a different currency, then please put the measurement for your units in your introduction. So that means the introduction is sometimes one sentence, sometimes two sentences, not longer. It's the easiest paragraph to write in IELTS Writing Task 1, you should not make any mistakes with this. So please make sure you practice that. Now, let's move on and we'll have a look at the overview. The overview is the most important paragraph in your IELTS Writing Task 1. This is the paragraph where you will collect all the key features and put them together in an overview statement. The examiner is looking for the overview. If you have no overview, you will not get above Band Score 5 for task achievement. That's 25% of your marks. If you have an overview, that's Band Score 6, if you have a clear overview, that's Band Score 7. So your Band Score will go up depending on this overview, so very important. Now, before I show you how to write your overview, let's have a look at what the key features are. If you look at the chart, you will see that in red is the UK and in blue is France. And of course, key features are all about the high points and the low points of your chart. So if we look here for the red one, that's UK, we can see that most of the spending was on cars. And also for France, the blue one, that's the same. So both France and the UK spent most of their money on cars. But if we look at the other end, so the lower points for England, the least amount of money was spent on perfume. And for France, it was cameras. So those are key features. Is there any other key feature we can have? Yes. And of course what you need to look at is very simple. Can you see more red or more blue? So which country spent more money in total on the consumer goods? And you can see that obviously there is more red, so the UK spent more money than France. So let's write the overview. And here we've got the overview, so let's have a look. We start with the word overall, because we want to show the reader, to show the examiner that this is our overview. This is a good technique to use because it means the examiner can easily find the overview, and that will help us get a better band score. So overall, the expenditure of the UK was higher than that of France.
[9:08]So this is our first key feature. Overall, so taking the whole chart together, which one was higher? And you can see we're using a comparative. Overviews often usually have comparatives. Now we look at the next part. This is quite a long sentence, and it's connected with two linkers, you got while and compared to. So let's have a look. We got both the French and the British. So here I've changed it. Instead of giving the name of the country, I'm using the nationality. Both the French and the British spent the most money on cars. And here we've got a superlative, so the highest, the most. While in the UK, the least, again this is a superlative, the least amount of money was spent on perfume compared to cameras in France. So in total in this overview, we've got three key features. We've got which one was higher than the other overall, and we've got the most money spent and the least money spent. Three key features, how many do you normally have? Well, it's very rare to have only one, I think that's almost impossible. You are usually looking at two, three, or four key features, occasionally five. It depends on all the information in your chart or your table, for example. Right, so that's the overview, now let's have a look at the body paragraphs. This is one way to organize the body paragraphs.
[10:59]Now, let me give you a rule first, you must divide the body paragraphs, you cannot have one body paragraph. You are being tested on your organization and your use of paragraphs. So if you have only one body paragraph, it's going to be hard to get a good result for coherence and cohesion. So I'm going to show you two different ways to organize the body paragraphs. The most important thing is that it's logical. So this is one possibility. In Body Paragraph A, we can have information about cars, perfume, and cameras. And that is because we highlighted them as the highest and the lowest. So that would be a very easy, logical way to organize your writing. And of course Body Paragraph B would have the other two categories, so computers and books. Let me show you another way to organize it. And here is the alternative, the other way to organize your body paragraphs. You can see I've got cars, books, and cameras together. Let's have a look why. Well, cars, you can see that the UK was higher than France. The next one, books, that's the same. The UK spent more money than France on books. And cameras, you can see the same. You can see a significant difference between the spending. And for body paragraph B, we have the reverse. So you can see that computers, France spent more than England, UK. And perfume, you can see again that France spent more than the UK on perfume. So that is the other way to organize it. Which one is better? They are both very good, they will both give you a Band Score 9 for organization. The most important thing is that it's logical and easy to follow for the reader. Now let's just have a quick look at how to write the body paragraph. Here we have two sample sentences for the category of cars and books. So let's have a look. You can see that we start off with a linker, in terms of cars. This is very nice because the reader immediately knows which category we're talking about. In terms of cars, the UK spent around 450,000 pounds. So when you're writing your body paragraphs, you need to take a look at the graph, at the chart, and you need to have a look, this is the cars and here we've got the UK, and you can see that it is between 400,000 and 500,000. We cannot write it was 450,000 because we cannot see exactly, but we can see that it was around 450,000 pounds. So they spent around 450,000 pounds on this, that means cars, as opposed to, this is a very nice linker to connect the information about France and England, as opposed to exactly 400,000 pounds in France. And you can see here we've got 400,000 pounds. Then we move on to books, that's this one here. And it says that the expenditure on books in the UK was higher than in France. So we've got another comparative. When you have a comparative like that, you still need to give the numbers, the data. You cannot miss the data. If your sentences in the body paragraph are not supported by data, you will get about Band Score 5 for task achievement. So that's another problem. So please avoid that and always support your sentences with the numbers. So you can see in this sentence, what I've done is I've decided to put the numbers in brackets. So that's another bracket sentence and you can say I've got about 400,000 and about 300,000 pounds respectively. Now, respectively means that the order of the numbers follows the order in the sentence. UK is first, that number refers to the first one, the second number refers to the second one. So, make sure you've got your the order of information right. And also if you decide to use this method and have a sentence using respectively, please don't put a long list of numbers, because it becomes very difficult for the examiner to check. He has to go through each number and check that everything is correct. He will check every number that you write. So those are two examples of complex sentences to describe the categories in the body paragraphs. Of course you have to write the others. Other things I want to point out, and that's here, just here. You can see that I have written a symbol for the pound sign. I have not written Pound Sterling. And that's because I don't want to keep repeating words all the time. It is fine in IELTS Writing Task 1 to use symbols. You can use symbols for currencies and percentages and many other things. So please make sure that you use that. And when the examiner is counting the number of words you've written, he will take that as one word because it's just a symbol with a number. So that is the body paragraphs. If you would like to see the full model, so a Band Score 9 piece of writing for this chart, then I will give you a link at the end of this video so you can have a look. Well, that's all for this lesson. If you found it useful, please press like. If you have questions, then put them under the video or visit my blog. On my blog there are many answers to questions about Writing Task 1 as well as all the other skills in IELTS, so please take a look. I will see you again in another IELTS lesson.
