In this post: What counts as a trend chart, how to divide the body when there are many lines or only a few, and the trend verbs and nouns to learn in pairs.
Writing About Trends · 3 parts
- 1. Chart types, plans and trend verbs (you are here)
- 2. Two patterns, peaks and projections
- 3. Comparisons, mistakes and practice
✦ In this post
Of all the Task 1 types, trend charts are the only one where I scored 7.5. The difficulty is not the numbers but the verbs: rise, climb, surge and soar all mean going up, but to different degrees; dip and plummet both mean going down, but they are worlds apart. Choose one wrong word and the trend the examiner reads is no longer the trend on the graph.
In this post I use five trend-chart essays that I sent for marking: monthly metal prices (Task 8, Band 7), internet users (Task 28, Band 7), community centre activities (Task 29, Band 7), acid rain emissions (Task 36, Band 6) and a bar chart of spending on roads (Task 40, Band 7.5). Between 6 and 7.5, almost all the difference comes down to what this post covers.
1. Identifying the type: what counts as a trend chart
There is only one test: are there two or more points in time on the horizontal axis or in the columns? If so, it is a trend chart, whether it looks like a line graph, a bar chart or a table.
| Format | How you can tell it shows change | Examples I wrote | Common trap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Line graph | The horizontal axis shows years or months | Task 28: internet users in the USA, Canada and Mexico, 1999–2009; Task 29: five activities at a Melbourne community centre, 2000–2020; Task 36: acid rain emissions from four UK sectors, 1990–2007 | With many lines, describing them one by one until it reads like a list |
| Bar chart | Each group of bars represents a different year | Task 40: share of spending on roads and transport in four countries, 1990–2005; Task 5: US household income distribution in 2007, 2011 and 2015 | Treating it as a static chart, comparing sizes without describing change |
| Table | The columns are two years | Fairtrade coffee and banana sales, 1999 and 2004 (I come back to this in the static charts post) | Copying numbers without saying what rose or fell |
| Rate-of-change chart | The vertical axis shows percentage change | Task 8: monthly change in the prices of three metals, 2014 | A positive value means the price is still rising; a smaller value does not mean the price fell |
My notes have a section of “must-know line graph sentences” where I collected useful trend sentences, with one sentence frame for each common situation, such as “A rose the most of all” or “A was higher than B except in certain years”. I suggest you build your own version: after each essay, copy in the trend sentences you used correctly, and note beside each one whether it describes a small fall, a flat period or a sharp rise. After about twenty essays, the right words will start coming to you as soon as you see the lines.
2. Paragraph plan: how to divide many lines or few
| What the chart looks like | Body 1 | Body 2 | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2–3 lines | The highest line, or the one that changed most | The other lines + a comparison with the first | Task 28: the body covers the USA and Canada (which cross), then Mexico |
| 4–5 lines | One group with similar trends (e.g. all flat) | Another group with similar trends (e.g. all changing a lot) | Task 29: film club + martial arts (stable) vs table tennis, musical performances, amateur dramatics (big changes) |
| Bar chart with several countries and years | Countries moving in the same way | Countries with different or opposite trends | Task 40: Italy + the UK (fluctuating) vs Portugal (falling) + the USA (rising) |
| Lots of crossing lines | You can group by before and after a crossing point, but each paragraph needs a topic sentence | Same as left | Task 36 was split into two paragraphs by year, so each of the four lines was described twice, and CC was only 6 |
My own experience: grouping by trend is safer than grouping by year. If you split by year, each paragraph has to go over every line again, and the reader has to piece together each line’s full movement; if you group by trend, each line appears only once and the topic of each paragraph is easy to state.
Both with many lines: Task 36 (Band 6) vs Task 29 (Band 7)
These two essays are worth looking at together. The acid rain graph had four lines and the community centre graph had five, so the number of lines was similar, and both had plenty of crossings. The difference: in the acid rain essay I split the paragraphs into 1990–1999 and 2000–2007. The first paragraph covered electricity, transport and domestic emissions; the second covered other industries, electricity and domestic again. Some lines appeared twice and some only once, and in the second paragraph transport was mentioned only in passing, as “the line that overtook electricity”. After reading it, the examiner would struggle to say what the overall trend for transport was.
For the community centre essay, I first asked myself which lines changed little and which changed a lot. Film club and martial arts stayed close to their original levels over the twenty years, so they went in the first paragraph; table tennis rose sharply, musical performances grew from zero and amateur dramatics declined steadily, so they went in the second. Each line was described only once, and the first sentence of each paragraph told the reader what it was about. I think this difference is the main reason CC went from 6 to 8.
3. Trend verbs and nouns
Learn verbs and nouns in pairs, because one of the two patterns later (see Part 2) uses a verb and the other uses a noun.
| Direction | Verbs (past tense) | Nouns | Degree note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up | rise (rose), increase, grow (grew), climb, go up | a rise, an increase, growth (mostly uncountable) | Neutral and the most common |
| Sharply up | surge, soar, rocket | a surge | Very big and fast; use sparingly, only when the line is really steep |
| Down | fall (fell), decrease, decline, drop, go down | a fall, a decrease, a decline, a drop | Neutral |
| Slightly down | dip | a dip | A small, brief fall, usually followed by a recovery |
| Sharply down | plummet, plunge | a plunge | A very large fall; use only for a real cliff-edge drop |
| Flat | remain stable, remain essentially unchanged, stabilise, level off, plateau | a plateau | Level off means becoming flat after rising or falling |
| Small ups and downs | hover around, stay at around | — | Close to a certain level, with very little change |
| Fluctuating | fluctuate | a fluctuation | Only for clear ups and downs |
| High point | peak at, reach a peak of, hit a high of | a peak | Peak doesn’t need highest as well |
| Low point | hit a low of, bottom out at | a low | If it recovers after the low, add before recovering |
| Recovery | recover, rebound | a recovery, a rebound | Rising again after a fall |
Four pairs that are easy to confuse
Dip and drop: dip means going down a little and quickly coming back. When the film club numbers fell from 64 to 60 and then went back up to 66, dipped is the most vivid choice. If the figure falls and doesn’t come back, use dropped or fell.
Plummet and decline sharply: plummet is a free-fall drop. Use it at most once per essay, and only when the slope on the graph justifies it. On the acid rain graph, the electricity line fell from 3.3 to 0.5 steadily over seventeen years, so declined dramatically or fell steadily is more accurate than plummeted.
Level off and remain stable: level off implies moving first and then stopping. For example, after nickel’s increase fell from 6% to 1%, it stayed at 1% in March and April, so levelled off was correct. If there was little change from the start, use remained stable or remained essentially unchanged.
Overtake and exceed: overtake and surpass emphasise the moment when something that was behind moves ahead; exceed simply means “larger than”. Use overtook for a crossing point, and exceeded or was higher than to compare sizes in a given year.
Prepositions: one word decides the meaning
| Preposition | Meaning | Example (demonstration) |
|---|---|---|
| rise to 40% | Rose to 40% (the end point) | The figure rose to 40% in 2009. |
| rise by 10% | Rose by 10 units (the size of the change) | Spending rose by 4 percentage points. |
| from A to B | Start point to end point | It climbed from 10% to almost 100%. |
| at 20% | Stood at / was at | It stood at 20% in 1999. |
| a rise of 5% | Noun followed by the size of the change | There was a rise of 5% in 2015. |
| a rise in sales | Noun followed by what changed | There was a sharp rise in internet use. |
Continue reading · Part 2 of 3
IELTS Notes in English · Task 1 Structure (post 3 of 7)
← Previous: What Goes in a Task 1 Overview? From Listing Numbers to Seeing the Big Picture
Next →: How to Write About Static Charts in IELTS Task 1: Proportions, Comparisons and “Respectively”
Task 1 Structure · Task 2 Structure · Topic Guides · Writing Language · Band Score Samples · Practice Methods · Speaking & Study Tips
✦ Target Your Future
Some days you practise for hours and the score still does not move. I hope these notes remind you that the setbacks are part of the road: every recording you replayed, every essay you rewrote and every sentence you finally dared to say is progress you have already made.
I wrote this down so the next person can take fewer detours. You do not have to follow my method exactly. Find a rhythm that works for you, rest when you need to, and come back for the next small step.
I hope what you take away is more than a number on a score report: a little more confidence in yourself, and the courage to step a bit closer to the world.
— Ting
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