Posts

Showing posts from November, 2020

How to tame your IELTS pie charts

Image
IELTS line graphs are easy to tame - you just go chronologically, so the description doesn't get out of hand. Information in pie charts, however, can be hard to organize because there are different directions you can go in. In this post, I want to share two IELTS pie chart answers I wrote for the same task. The task is from Cambridge IELTS 11 . The introduction and the overview are the same. As you read, pay attention to the organization and try to decide which description works better. ✼✼✼ Introduction  The pie charts compare the percentage of British students of one English university who knew foreign languages in 2000 and 2010. Main Body Version 1 The percentage of students in three groups grew. Speakers of Spanish formed the largest share in both years, rising by 5% from 30% to 35%. The increase was the same in the “Another language” and “Two other languages” groups. In 2010, the former amounted to 20%, while the latter comprised 15%, making up the second and third largest prop

A surefire path to happiness

Image
✼✼✼ “What is your name?” “Irina.” “And what is your address?” Little did I know these questions were about to usher in the happiest moment of my life. After the crash, all went black. In one big blur, I was carried from the car to the ground, to the ambulance, to the hospital. It was beginning to slowly dawn on me what had happened. The word terrifying doesn’t do it justice. But was I breathing? I was. Did I remember my name? I did. Could I recall my address? I could. Were those doctors around me? They were. The feeling of overwhelming, all-consuming happiness was ballooning inside me with each question. I was alive, in my right mind, being taken care of. If you’ve been in a car crash, you’ll know the feeling. Most people haven’t. They think they have all the time in the world, so they delay happiness. Happiness is to be experienced some time in the future. Happiness is to be experienced when they graduate, get married, buy an apartment, reach that goal, fulfil that dream. Not that the