IELTS Academic task 1
Lesson 2: organizing body paragraphs
After you’ve written a short introduction, you start writing the body paragraphs. There, you should describe your graph by providing the data.
In order to organize your body paragraphs well, you should
- give a general overview
- group your data by some feature; describe each similar feature in a separate paragraph.
Example 1: line graph
The line graph below shows the household recycling rates in three different
countries.
Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main
features, and make comparisons where relevant.
When giving a general overview, you shouldn’t state any specific details, you should simply write what’s happening on the graph overall.
It's a good technique to write 'Overall,' before giving an overview.
In this example it could be done as follows:Overall, recycling rates of UK and Germany showed a steady but significant rise over the period, while percentage of recycled waste in France experienced a downward trend.
Basically, you’re saying that UK and Germany’s rates ↑ , France’s rates ↓ . It's very important to give an overview, your essay will score much lower without it!
Then, you should group data by some feature and give specific details. In this line graph you can group data in two ways:
- by country
- by similar trend
Describe each country’s recycling rates in a separate paragraph
As you can see, the UK and Germany followed a similar trend: their recycling rates were increasing throughout the period, while recycling rates of France experienced a fall.
So you can describe an “increase pattern” in the first paragraph and a “decrease pattern” in the second paragraph.
The last option is better. Here's an example of providing specific data:
In 2005 the recycling rates of UK and Germany were nearly 35% and 20% respectively. Germany's rate increased sharply throughout the period, exceeding France's rate in 2009 and reaching almost 60% in the end of the period. In the meantime, the percentage of recycled waste in UK grew to 40% in 2007, and then remained steady until 2009. During 2009-2011 it experienced a rapid surge to more than 50% and continued with a gradual increase to 60% in 2015.
In early 2005 the recycling rate of France was the highest among these three countries. However, it dramatically declined to 30% in 2013. Then, there was a growth of 10% in 2015, but France's recycling rate was the lowest in the end of the period.
Example 2: pie chart
In this pie chart there are also several ways to group data:
- by country
- by movie genre
- by similar trend
Describe each country’s percentages in each paragraph.
Compare each movie genre in a separate paragraph.
Describe the most popular genres in the first paragraph, and the least popular genres in the second paragraph.
Note that if you have a process description question, you have no other choice to group data but to describe each stage of a process.
Similarly, if your question asks you to compare two maps, your only option of grouping data is describing each change on the map.