Hello, I'm Oli. Welcome to Oxford Online English. In this lesson, we're going to look at the IELTS writing exam, and specifically how to approach question one of the academic IELTS writing.
Let's start at the beginning: what does question one ask you to do? In academic IELTS, question one normally involves some kind of data, like a table, a chart, a graph, a diagram, or maybe a map.
Your job is generally to write some kind of summary of the data that you're given. Sometimes, questions include a combination of different data types, so you might have a line graph and a table, or two different maps, for example.
The word count for question one is 150 words. Like all IELTS writing, this means you need to write a minimum of 150 words, or you will lose points.
You should aim to write around 160-170 words, and your answer should take you around 20 minutes. Let's start by looking at a sample question which we're going to use for this lesson.
So this is the text of the question. It mentions two pie charts, which I'll show you in a minute.
Pause the video to read the question. We're going to look at the pie charts; here they are. So your job is to summarise the information from the charts and make comparisons.
OK, let's talk about planning your writing. Even though you don't have much time in the exam, it's still important to plan your answer.
Planning your answer will help to make your writing clearer and better organised, which can help you to get a better score. It's also very easy to just get lost in the data if you don't plan: in question one it's important to find trends or patterns to give structure to your answer.
We'll come back to this point several times during this lesson. First of all, you only need a short introduction, and you don't need a conclusion.
