Identifying Main Trends / Differences

Hello Everybody we are looking at a new section today and the section is Section 3 which is all about answering the question or in-band descriptive terms. We are looking at the category of task achievement. Now this first lecture is going to focus on identifying main trends or looking for patterns in Task One questions. It’s going to be a fairly short lecture. So let’s get started by looking at the band descriptors as usual. So in the band descript is one of the requirements to achieve band 7 in Task achievement is to present a clear overview of main trends differences or stages. Now we will be looking at the overview in more detail in a later lecture. For now we will focus on two questions related to this requirement. Firstly should we focus on trends differences or stages. And secondly how do we find these. How do we find these trends differences or stages. Well it’s important to look at a variety of task types will begin by looking at identifying trends. Now whether you writes about trends differences or stages will depend on which type of question or graph that you are given. With the trend is where we’re going to talk about trends. As you might expect because it contains data plotted over a time period. In this case months in 2014 regardless of whether the graph is a bar chart a line graph a table cetera if information is being measured against dates. It can be called a graph with the trend in which case we are going to try and identify those trends. You can see differences to be in graphs like this particularly in the overview. You should be trying to focus primarily on the trends. Let’s have a look at this here. Basically identifying trends is about following the direction of the slopes. It’s as easy as that I’m going to illustrate with some drawing on the graph here. So the ukase figure slopes upwards as you can see indicating an upward trend until July but after July the figure slopes downwards which indicates a downward trend. Australia is a C sales or air conditioning sales they experienced a reverse of this trend going down and then up again just following the slopes. So then in your overview to address the requirement to identify main trends you simply mentioned this whereas the number of air conditioning sales in the U.K. rose and then fell Australia’s units experienced the opposite trend. It was identifying those main trends. It’s very unlikely you’ll need to worry about trends with maps or processes or focus on those. When talking about graphs with the trend look at differences when we should pick out differences. Now the two charts to your left. We have a pie chart above and a bar chart below. When combined these can be described as a comparative graph. In this case of course we’re looking at charts doesn’t really matter because there are no units of time. We can’t talk about any trends that can’t be any rises or falls no jumps or slumps no put trends or time with trends. However we can look for comparisons and the comparisons are everywhere you look. We have more gas than solar power. We have more coal power than gas power. There’s less wind and solar coal and gas. So lots of different ways that we could talk about the differences. So how do you decide which comparisons to focus on with so many to pick from and in other words what are the key differences. The most important differences with the answer here is that there are no there were no key differences but it makes more sense to talk about some differences than others here. We want to focus on the most and the least of things. This also creates a logical opportunity for a complex sentence improving our grammar school. You can see the example here whereas the majority of electricity is consumed by heating. The minority goes towards charging if possible find ways to group data together. We’ll be looking at this in more detail. In the lecture on overviews in the next section but here’s a quick example of that. Renewable energy sources make up far less of total electricity than non renewable sources. So rather than solar and wind we’re saying renewable rather than gas and coal we’re saying nonrenewable differences are also very important to pick out in maps. You can focus on the differences between the old city and the new city. Are there more shopping facilities are there fewer trees. Is the new map more modern or less modern. This is also true for processes. We can look at differences in the amount of equipments or the materials involved in the stage. Here’s an example. The first stage involves four pieces of equipment and only one ingredient. While the reverse is true for the second stage now that example actually relates to this task here this process we can look at the differences in the process with the equipment and the number of elements that go into each part. But most of the time when we’re looking at processes we want to think about stages. So disgusting stages is perhaps the simplest of the overview requirements and this requirement refers to this task here as well. So let’s have a look at how to identify key stages. Basically it’s simply a matter of accurately counting the number of stages involved in the process. Sometimes the number of steps involved is unclear. Such as in the case with cement production it’s not very clear whether crushing the limestone is one or two stages but you may use terms like appears to be to avoid slipping into inaccuracy for example whereas cement production appears to be composed of seven steps concrete production only consists of two as long as you support these numbers in your detailed paragraphs. For example you say the mixing is the first stage and rotating is the second stage. It would not be right to label your information as inaccurate. So you are addressing task requirements appropriately and assuring accuracy which we’re going to talk about in more detail in a couple of lectures time. But in the next lecture we’re going to focus on identifying information in the detail. Paragraph’s.