I'm adam.

Welcome back to ink vid dot com.

Today's lesson is for the ill students who are going to be taking the aisles test.

It's for everybody to be honest with you.

This lesson is useful for anybody who needs to do some writing, but especially for those of you who are going to take the test and because it's for the test, I'm going to start speaking in a little bit more natural speed, gonna kill two birds with one stone.

Get a little bit of listening, practice and some information.

Okay, so let's get started.

I'll academic task task one.

What does this task ask you to do?

It asks you to look at an infographic, what is an infographic information graphic?

It's gonna give you a bar, a bar chart, a graph diagram, a pie chart to table all kinds of things.

It's going to ask you to take this graphic, visual with whatever information is in it, convert it into words and sentences.

Okay, very straightforward.

Now, if you look on Ingrid dot com, excuse me.

M a colleague of mine did a very good lesson on how to score high on this task.

Excuse me, watch that video.

But this is a little bit different.

She was talking about how to write.

I'm going to tell you what to write.

Okay, one of the most difficult aspects of this task is looking at this information graphic and knowing what information to pick out and include in your report.

Okay.

And that's what it is.

It's a report now because we're talking about a report.

It's very important to remember that a report is not an essay.

It has very different structures that has very different requirements.

Okay, let's start, what are we going to write?

They ask you to write a minimum of 150 words.

Your target is 170 to 190.

150 is just not enough and you don't want to go under because why lose points that way, aim for 1 70 to 1 90 you'll get everything you need to say.

Now let's look at the introduction.

Okay, very different from an essay.

Your introduction is gonna be very short 1 to 2 sentences.

Once you start your third sentence, you're saying too much, you're saying more than you need to say.

What do you have to say in the introduction?

What am I looking at?

That's all they want you to do in the introduction.

What am I looking at?

I'm looking at a graph.

I'm looking at the table.

This table shows this table demonstrates.

This diagram shows, illustrates, demonstrates.

You don't need that many words illustrates demonstrates, shows whatever they wrote in the task.

Use one of the other words in your introduction.

Okay, basically that's what you're doing.

You're rephrasing the task, they tell you what you're looking at.

They say look at the following graph about this and that and summarize what it says.

Okay, this graph shows blah, blah blah.

Okay, now I this is a very common mistake people make in your introduction in your entire report for task one, there should never be the word I there should never be the word me or we.

This is not about you.

This is about the infographic only now because it's not about you, there is absolutely no opinion.

You will not reach any conclusions.

You will not make an analysis.

You will not try to understand what's going on.

You will not make any inference.

You will not take this information to understand other information.

You will not make any predictions.

Oh what's going to happen after this information is explained.

You're not going to explain anything.

All you're going to do is show me what is in the infographic?

Right.

Are you going to give me an explanation?

Are you gonna give me the meaning of what you're looking at?

No, you're not.

You are only going to give me facts.

Okay I'm the greater.

For example, I'm grading your task one your report.

I don't care if you understand what you're looking at.

All I care is that can you take this information and explain it to me in good english?

This is an english test.

Not an intelligence test.

It doesn't matter if you understand it or not.

Can you convert to the infographic into words and sentences?

That's it.

Now having said that.

Keep your introduction.

In fact keep your whole report.

But especially the introduction, very simple, very straightforward.

You don't need fancy language, you don't need very high end vocabulary, you just need to have different vocabulary, You need to have good sentence structures and give me the information that you see.

Now before I look at the body of the report, I want to actually look at the conclusion.

Okay, you're gonna have your introduction, you're gonna have your body.

What about the conclusion?

Now?

This is a bit of a trick question.

Do you see all these things I wrote about the conclusion?

That's what you're going to give me nothing.

There is no conclusion in task one because you're not reaching any conclusions, you're not explaining anything.

All you're doing is giving me information.

You have an introduction paragraph very short one or two sentences.

You have one or two body paragraphs.

That's it.

Okay, don't try to get too fancy, don't try to show off your intelligence, that's not what they're looking for, english test, remember that.

Okay, now obviously the most important part, what do I put in the body?

Let's look at that.

Okay, we're gonna look at two things when we're looking at your report, body first, we're gonna look at some things that you can look for, Some things to pick out, some information to include in your report and after that we'll look at how to split up your two paragraphs or one paragraph, depending on the situation.

So what are some things to look for in your report.

Let's say you're looking at graphs.

Okay, so first thing always pay attention to your axes, your x y axis, what is the information here?

What is the information here?

What is going up here?

What is going up here with that in mind?

What are their ranges?

Let's say you're talking about time, you're talking about 1960-2010.

You have a 50 year range, make sure you mention that range if it's going all the way across, if it's a short range mentioned that, But what about that range?

What are you mentioning within that range?

All kinds of things, peaks and valleys.

So again, let's go like this, This is a peak, this is a valley.

Another way to look at, it is highs and lows.

If a graph is moving up and down, pay attention to the peaks, pay attention to the valleys.

If it's very steady peaks and valleys.

No problem, you can mention the stability aspect of it.

Okay, now, here, I also mentioned plateaus, you're going up up up up, up up and flat up up up up up flat, this is a plateau means where things flatten out and stay stable.

Don't change too much on this axis.

Okay, on this axis, everything continues forward.

This is usually time or number of increase in sales percentage, for example, it could be many things, this is any variable that can be, this is the range within which you measure things usually.

Okay, peaks, valleys, highs and lows.

Now you're also looking for patterns how things are the same.

Like if you're comparing two or three things or five things or six things, what are the patterns?

What are they all doing?

The same?

Trends is another way all of them are trending up.

All of them are trending down.

Some are trending up, Some are trending down.

You're gonna be comparing and contrasting, but you keep these very general okay.

If you're comparing five things and you find four of them share a pattern, don't talk about each of them individually.

Put all four into one lump group.

These four countries from the west are all increasing their military spending?

The one country in the south is decreasing.

Okay, so the trends lump them together, then you look for the anomalies.

Now, what is an anomaly?

It's something out of the ordinary.

If you have a pattern, everybody's going up up up, but one is going down that one is the anomaly.

It is outside the pattern.

Outside the trend.

Exception is another way to say anomaly.

Something that goes against the trend here, you will get a little bit more detailed and give me specific numbers or whatever the variables are to talk about how it is the exception.

What is the exception?

What is the change of direction?

What is the pattern that it the thing or the person or the place itself is following.

Now, if you have tables, tables have columns and rows.

Pay attention to the headings in the columns and the rows, they're gonna tell you a lot of information.

You might want to include that.

You could just put that into your introduction if it's a very general thing, if it's very important to what's going on, you put that into your body as well.

Now, if you're looking at a diagram, excuse me.

A Diagram usually shows a process or a cycle of the life cycle of an ant or a moth.

Okay, what you want to do is you want to identify the start of the cycle or the process.

You want to identify the finish or the end of the process and you want major steps along the way.

You don't need to tell me every little bit of detail.

Remember it's 170 words.

There's only so much you can say.

Don't try to include everything.

Major steps, milestones.

What is a milestone?

A milestone is when something reaches a specific point in a process.

So a moth, for example, the mother moth or the adult moth lays eggs.

That's one milestone the eggs hatch into larva.

That's another milestone.

Six weeks pass by.

They eat the leaves, blah blah blah.

Little details not so important.

Next step, the larva start building their cocoon around themselves.

That's a milestone.

Time goes by.

They get fed this and that the other and the next milestone, the cocoon opens the wings come out.

These are the steps you want to make, you don't want every little detail major steps and milestones.

Now, when you're comparing things, you always look for the similarities and you always look for the differences.

You are going to spend more words on the differences than you are on the similarities because the similarities, you could say all of them do this.

One of them does this, this and that and that specific order in this specific time, the differences are more detailed.

The similarities are more general.

Same as patterns and anomalies.

It's the same idea.

Okay, so these are all the things you're gonna be looking for.

Again, you don't need everything.

You don't want to tell me what every piece of the puzzle is doing?

So let's say you're comparing five different countries here.

You don't wanna tell me this country did this, this country did that, this country did this, this country did that.

This country that no A you don't have time be.

You don't have space in terms of words and see it's not important.

Okay, you want to tell me a B and C are doing this way.

D.

Is going the opposite way.

That's what you want to tell me.

Okay, so that's all the information you're going to look for.

Now, how do you split up your paragraphs?

Let's look at that.

Okay, so now we have to think about how to split up our report.

One of the problems people have, is they don't know when to switch to a new paragraph.

Right?

So again, there's no rule.

You have to feel it out when you're doing it.

But here's a suggestion.

If you're only looking at one chart or one graph or one pie chart table, etcetera, you can split it in two ways.

One in the first paragraph.

Look at all the trends, all the patterns, all the things that are basically similar in the second paragraph.

Focus on the major differences, the anomalies and exceptions.

Okay, that's the easiest way to split it.

Another way is in your first paragraph.

Again, even in the table, you're gonna have two or three things in a graph, you're gonna have two or three different things in different variables, etcetera.

In the first paragraph, focus on one thing, like you're comparing two countries.

Focus on the first country, what it's doing in the graph.

Second paragraph.

Focus on the second one.

Okay, again, it's a little bit straightforward to be honest.