Free IELTS Vocabulary

Author: Bob
Updated Date 21/12/2011 23:03:49
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In this post, we're going to give you some of the most useful English vocabulary for IELTS Writing Task. For the speaking task, it's more likely to be less formal. In other words, for the speaking task, the examiner would like to see how you express your ideas and how comfortably you can communicate in English. Even though you cannot use academic words in your speaking, everything should be fine.

That's why using vocabulary in your essays must be carefully considered. Hence, in this article, we would like to give you more about IELTS Writing Vocabulary especially for describing graphs.

There are 3 areas that most IELTS students find it difficult to express their ideas: describing a time period, describing percentages, and explaining a trend.

1) Identifying and writing key ideas for key periods:

This kind of exercise normally takes place in most IELTS Writing. One sample for the requirement is: "The chart and graph below give information about sales and share prices for Coca-Cola. Write a report for a university lecturer describing the information shown below. You should write at least 150 words. You should spend about 20 minutes on this task".

IELTS Writing Sample - Task 1

When writing your essay for this task, you would probably want to discuss the trend during or in a specific period of time. For doing this, you can use but not limited to only these expressions:

IELTS Writing Graph Instructions

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Free IELTS Vocabulary

2) Selecting suitable vocabulary for percentages

When writing your essays, you should try your best to avoid repetition. The more vocabulary and phrases you can use, the higher your score will be. One of the many mistakes in terms of repeating words or phrases is using percentage figures again and again. For example, a student wrote his essay “24% of the spending is for food. For clothing, people spend 6%. 12% of their income is spent on housing. Next, around 18% is spent on transport”. Such writing is normally only band 5 because it shows the student’s weakness in expressing his ideas. Now let’s take a look at what we can use instead.

One sample for the requirement is: "You should spend about 20 minutes on this task. Write a report for a university lecturer describing the information shown below. You should write at least 150 words."

IELTS Writing Sample - Task 1

From the graph, you can easily see there are many figures to be reported and all of them are percentages. Of course, you would need to say 24%, 6%, 12% or whatever which is available in the graph. The matter now is how to make your writing more attractive.

Example 1:

ielts vocabulary describe percentages

After 4 months of planting, the sugar content of the fruit nearly reached 90% of the total content.

After 4 months of planting, the sugar content of the fruit peaked at 85%.

=> Adding adverbs and verbs to emphasize the trends can improve your writing score.

Example 2:

ielts trend graph vocabulary

In 1986, the sale went down below 20% of the revenue.

Example 3:

In this section, you will see examples on how to describe reports in the form of surveys.

ielts trend graph vocabulary

  • Reading book is cited by around 22% of the population surveyed as one the most favourite activities in spare time.

  • Some people, 22%, also cite reading book is one of their most favourite activities.

  • Just a few number of people, around 22%, say reading book is one their most favourite activities.

  • 22% of the people cite reading book is one their most favourite activities.

  • The last group, 53%, said surfing the Internet is ...

3) To describe a trend, you can use:

  • from 1985 to 1990, there was a steady increase

  • the figure was slightly reduced

  • it declined

  • the figure was slightly decreased

The above phrases are commonly used in academic writing task 1. To summarise what you can write, we created the following graph:

ielts trend how to describe

ielts trend how to describe 2