the english language is full of idioms that don't make sense it never rains cats and dogs and i'm sorry i don't care how expensive your new computer or a diamond ring or a car is it never really costs an arm and a [Music] leg and come on anatomically it's absolutely impossible for your eyes to be bigger than your stomach however there is one english idiom which i think makes perfect sense you never get a second chance to make a first impression first impressions are so important you won't meet t
he person who marks your writing paper but you can still make a fantastic first impression by writing an introduction which paraphrases the task with no mistakes let's find out how hey as we saw in the last video every ielts report should start with a sentence that power phrases the task and with a little bit of practice this should be the easiest sentence you write in the exam because there are always three steps to writing a perfect introduction in step one you have to paraphrase the type of c
hart and the verb in step two you have to paraphrase the topic of the chart this can be the most difficult step and finally in step three you have to paraphrase the time phrase now maybe for some of you you're thinking well that's pretty basic however i have seen many high level students who make mistakes when paraphrasing the introduction so come on let's find out how to write a perfect introduction i am 99.999 sure that the first four words in your writing one task will be the chart below show
s and i guess for us to be able to paraphrase those words we need to know what the different types of charts are called in english so i'm going to pause the video and show you the six most common types of charts i want you to look at the charts and write down the name of each chart i want you to write them down because it's not enough for you to know it in your brain dictionary you have to be able to spell it okay here they come hopefully that task wasn't too difficult let's have a quick look at
the answers together chart number one this type of chart is called a bar chart it's called a bar chart because it's made of these bars and i remember it like they are prison bars that are stopping you starting your new life chart number two that's a pie chart it's called a pie chart because it looks like a pie which is bad news if you are hungry in the exam so make sure you have breakfast on exam day chart number three is not a chart this type of chart is called a line graph you don't actually
need the word line you could if you wanted to just call it a graph but i like to call it a line graph because it's more descriptive number four that's a table i think that's more or less the same in most languages number five now number five i'm showing you now but actually we won't see number five again for quite a long time because number five is a flow chart i know it's a flow chart because you can see these arrows which take you from one stage to another stage and this type of chart we will
see in our process tasks and that's something we can worry about later in the course and finally number six it's a map i have nothing what to say it's a map it's a map it's a map again this is a different type of task which we will see later in our course these are our six types of charts a bar chart a pie chart a line graph a table a flow chart and a map when we start our report we will start by saying the bar chart the table the map please don't forget the the the is very important for me as a
n english person so just remember always start with the word the and then the type of chart let's move to the third word of the task below the chart below shows how will you paraphrase the word below [Music] you won't when you finish writing your report in the exam have a look below your answer and tell me can you see a chart no so don't tell me in the introduction the bar chart below there is no chart below so below no this brings us to the final part of stage one which is paraphrasing the verb
ielts tasks love the verb show it's in 99 of all the tasks i have seen therefore all we really need is just one verb to paraphrase the verb shows and the best verb is illustrates you don't need to write four or five or six words to paraphrase shows if you really want to you could also use the expression gives information about but that's it please don't waste time with unnecessary paraphrasing which brings us to stage two stage two is the most difficult part of writing the introduction because
stage two is really all about your paraphrasing skills and unfortunately i don't know what your particular graph in your exam will show it could be the number of female politicians in america it could be the amount of energy consumed in africa it could be the number of students who receive seven or higher in the ielts writing test i don't know however there are some common expressions which repeat again and again and again in ielts writing tasks so what i'd like you to do is pause the video and
have a look at these expressions and think how would you paraphrase these expressions how would you write these words or expressions using synonyms using different words take your time pause the video make sure you write the answers again we always need to be practicing our writing and i'll see you in a couple of minutes okay i'm making you work a little bit in this video let's have a look at our list so the first expressions in this list are talking about quantity and that's because most ielts
charts are giving you numbers and statistics and therefore are talking about quantities so the first one we've got the number of students i would paraphrase this as how many students the chart shows the number of students the bar chart shows how many students when we use the number of and how many that's for nouns we can count if you have an uncountable noun for example pollution we have here the amount of pollution well i can't count pollution so my paraphrase here would be how much how much po
llution next we have another really common ielts term the percentage of the population and the best way to paraphrase the percentage of is the proportion of they're very similar words percentage proportion they both start with a p so they should be quite easy to remember now let's move away from numbers and some other really common expressions lots of ielts charts divide between gender they divide between men and women so if you've got men you could paraphrase this to males don't forget the s ma
le with no s is an adjective males with an s is a noun and the same for women we can paraphrase this to females average average is another common ielts term if you're talking about the average number or the average time you can paraphrase this too typical then we've got every month every year here we can use a li monthly yearly fantastic synonyms finally we have expenditure ielts loves money or graphs that talk about money we can't really change expenditure just a one word but we could change it
to a phrase the amount of money spent on or how much money is or was spent on these are all wonderful synonyms that you can use when you're writing your introduction but please please please be careful of synonyms paraphrasing is a difficult skill and is one which many students makes mistakes with we'll see this in the next video but for this video i'll just say if you're going to paraphrase if you're going to change a word for a new word make sure you are 100 confident that the new word you us
e has got the same meaning as the original word but we'll talk more about this in the next video another really useful technique for paraphrasing is not using synonyms but using the information from the chart let me show you an example the task says the chart shows the percentage of adults who played three sports in 2014. well if we just look at the task we can paraphrase most of the task already we could see that it's a bar chart so we could say the bar chart illustrates the percentage of the p
roportion of adults who played three sports how could we paraphrase three sports a trio of sporting activities it's almost impossible but if we look at the chart we can easily see that the three sports were football golf and tennis so we can take these words from the task or from the chart and use them in our introduction the bar chart illustrates the proportion of adults who played tennis golf and football in a single year this technique of using information from the chart is particularly usefu
l when we are talking about countries lots of ielts tasks talk about five or six countries and it will say in the task in several countries you don't have to paraphrase in several countries you just need to look at the chart take the names of the countries and put them into your introduction the only thing i would say however is that if you have eight or more countries maybe it's not a good idea to spend you know two minutes writing the names of eight countries if you have eight nine ten countri
es which is very unusual but maybe possible then it's better just to say in a number of countries so they were two useful techniques for paraphrasing the main part of our introduction the topic of the chart we could use a synonym or we can use information from the chart and add it to the information from the task let's move then to the final stage of writing our introduction paraphrasing the time expression however before we start changing paraphrasing we should really talk about the importance
of the time expression because the time expression tells you the tense you should use when you write your report and it's really important that you choose the correct tense and keep that tense throughout your whole report it's a big mistake to move from the past to the present to the future if your graph only talks about the past so this first pie chart talks about one year 2002 so if in the exam you have a chart that only discusses one year which tense or tenses do you think you will need i thi
nk you will need the past tenses of course this is in the past and really because it's just one year you will probably only need the past simple tense however for our next graph we don't have one time in the past we have a range of times we have 1995 to 2012. so of course we will still need past tenses but this time because it's a range we will probably need the past simple and the past perfect and i'll talk about the past perfect when we talk about organizing our paragraphs it's a very useful t
ense for us to use in our task one what about this chart though this chart talks about monthly sunshine hours we can see we've got the different months january february march etc etc but there is no year so if we don't know the year but we know every january every february every march we should use which tense absolutely i think the present simple however if they added a past time to this if they told you this was for a particular year again for example 2012 then we go back to our past tenses bu
t if you have no time it's probably safe to use the present simple tense right this next type of graph to be honest is not very common i'm only showing it to you because i would like to be able to sleep well at night knowing that all my students have got all the information for every possible question in the exam because this chart it starts in the past however it finishes now so if you've got something which started in the past and ends now which tense should we really use for this chart i thin
k the present perfect that's what the present perfect does it says something started in the past and is unfinished now i have been a teacher for 20 years however although we'll need the present perfect in this graph when we're talking about individual years in the past again we will need our past tenses that's why this type of chart is not really very common in the ielts exam because it's a bit confusing for students it's a bit confusing for the people marking the exams so usually we're either i
n the past or talking about usually however there is one other type of common chart this one and it causes problems for students because this chart starts in the past but ends in the future so for this type of chart what tenses will we need we'll need a mix we will need some past tenses for the bid which is in the past and some future tenses for the bid that's in the future but i don't like this type of chart hopefully you won't have one in the exam but again it's best to be prepared okay so the
y're the different times you might get let's work out now how to paraphrase our time expressions i'm again going to ask you to pause the video and here are i think all of the time expressions you could find in the task one writing i want you to have a look and write down how you would paraphrase these time expressions how would you write these time expressions in different words off you go right this is it last time so let's check together number one from two classic ielts from 1995 to 2012. how
can we paraphrase this well the easiest way is just to change from to to between and between 1995 and 2012. however i think that's a bit boring that's a bit obvious that's a bit simple for me if you have a range of times i really like to talk about the period of time so i would paraphrase this to over an 18 year period please notice is 18 year period not years we're using year as an adjective here and therefore there is no s if you wanted to you could actually tell me the years by just adding t
hem in brackets after this expression brackets are very very useful in ielts writing one and we will see later we can use them a lot to help us add statistics to our information okay what about the second one we just had this one year in 2002 how could we paraphrase this honestly you don't have to paraphrase this because really a year is a year there's no real paraphrase if you did want to if you don't just want to leave in 2002 you could change it to in a single year and then again add the year
in brackets afterwards okay the third one is a really classic ielts expression in three periods this to be honest is like our three sports or our three countries the best way to paraphrase in three periods is to look at the chart and tell me what those three periods are for example 1980 1990 and 2000. if you wanted to if something strange happens if you can't see the years you could say in three particular years but honestly the best thing to do in this circumstance is just to look at the chart
and use those words in your introduction okay here we've got our friend the present perfect now from 1990 to now so if your chart and it probably won't but if it finishes now you could paraphrase this using since but you can only use since if the end of your chart is now if you have another past time you cannot use since so for this chart we could just say since 1990. and finally we've got our prediction for the future until 2030 and i think the best paraphrase of until is up to up to 2030. whi
le we're talking about predicting the future if you do have a chart which has got two time periods the past and the future i think is often a good idea to separate these in your introduction so rather than having one sentence with the past time and the future time to separate them and have a second sentence which talks about the future let me give you an example the graph below shows the consumption of energy in the usa from 1990 to 2012 with projections until 2030. so you can see it shows you w
here the past time ended 2012 and where the projections began if i was going to paraphrase this i would separate the future part so i would make a normal paraphrase for the beginning the graph illustrates how much energy was consumed in america between 1980 and 2012. stop and then have a sentence about the future it also offers an estimation a prediction a forecast up to 2030. you don't need all three of those words in your reports you just need one but i've given you three nice synonyms there f
or prediction projection estimation and forecast while we're talking about adding an extra sentence i also want to talk to you about unit some ielts charts talk about some very strange units i'm not talking about percentages or thousands or even millions these are rather common types of units however sometimes in the exam uh like in this graph here they use what i call a crazy unit so in this chart it's british thermal units what are they i don't really know something about energy however if you
have something like this in your exam it's rather nice to include this inside your introduction and all you need is the expression units are measured in and then you take your crazy unit and add it to the sentence do not do this if your chart is measured in percentages or thousands or something common this is just very useful if you do have something very long as a unit grams per person per day for example you don't want to write that again and again and again in your report so if you tell me i
n your introduction it's not necessary to repeat again and again inside your report finally one very important piece of advice lots of old ielts textbooks which are very out of date tell students to write a description of the x-axis and the y-axis the x-axis shows blah blah blah the y-axis shows blah blah blah no this is not a requirement of the test and actually you will lose marks because the task does not ask you to describe the axes so please if you have studied this already or if anybody ha
s told you to do this i am telling you please don't it won't get you any extra marks in fact you will lose marks if you do this so what have we learned in this video we have learned that there are three stages to writing an introduction we need to paraphrase the task so we need to learn the names of the different charts we never use the word below in our introduction when we paraphrase the verb we only need to use three alternatives shows illustrates or gives information about when you paraphras
e the main part of the task or the subject of the task there are some useful expressions we can learn but we need to be careful of paraphrasing which is what we will look at in the next video and we also need to learn how to paraphrase time expressions okay so now we know how to write introductions your job now of course is to go and do the practice activities and i will see you in the next video where i will teach you all about paraphrasing my name is shelly and this is my ielts classroom howev
er if you have a particular particular particular if you have a particular however if you have a particular however if you have a particular [Music] silly come on however if you have a specific year hey thanks so much for watching if you found the content useful please click like to help the channel and don't forget to subscribe for new lessons every friday plus you can find more expert content at www.myieltsclassroom.com
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