IELTS Writing task 1: Overseas students line graph

Dear teachers,

Here is my answer for a question in IELTS writing task 1, please help me revise my essay.

Thank you so much!!!

Question: The line graph below shows the number of overseas students who came from six Asian countries to study in Australia from 1994 to 1997.
Write a report summarising the information. Select and describe the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

My answer:

The line graph gives information about the amounts of students who studied abroad in Australia from six Asian nations between 1994 and 1997.

Overall, we can see that the number of students from all the countries had increased over a period of 4 years, except for Hong Kong, where there was a slight decrease. Out of 6 countries, the number of Korean pupils saw the most significant rise.

Looking at Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, we see that the amounts of students applying for schools in Australia rose steadily. In 1994, the respective amount of students from three countries were around 8000, just under 11000 and 11000. These figures had reached over 13000, 15000 and 18000 by 1997.

Turning to Japan and Korea, the number of overseas students from two countries studying in Australia were identical (approximately 10000). These figures peaked at above 13000 and about 20000 respectively in 1996, then fell to around 12000 and just over 18000 in 1997. By 1997, Korea had become a nation that has the highest number of students studying in Australia, along with Indonesia. By contrast, the number of overseas students came from Hong Kong fluctuated between 12000 and 14000 over the period shown. The amounts of students from this country dropped slightly to below 14000, compared to the initial figure in 1994 (over 14000).

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Hi Haru, I think you did a good job with this report. Your overall format is effective and I think it made sense the way you divided your body paragraphs. I know you don’t want to keep repeating “the number of students”, but “amount” does not work here. The trick is to instead vary your sentence structures, so you can have phrases like “students from Japan numbered 12000” or “an increase in Korean students”, “more students arrived from Hong Kong over the next two years”, “1994 to 1996 saw an influx of students from Korea, peaking at 20000”. So it is more than just coming up with suitable synonyms. Here are some other suggestions:

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Hi Luschen, thank you so much for your feedback. I found it’s difficult to paraphrase “the number of”, but now I figured it out.

It’s really a life-saver! Many thanks again :rose:

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