What a line graph is actually asking you to do
A line graph shows one or more values changing across time. That is the whole task, and it is easier than a pie chart because the data has a direction.
Your job is to report the trend accurately, compare the lines, and identify the features that matter. No opinion, no recommendation, no "this suggests".
One difficulty is worth naming before anything else: a line graph can hold five or six series over fifteen years, which is far more data than the twenty minutes allows. Nobody describes all of it. Choosing which lines get a sentence is the entire skill.
Group the lines before you write
Spend the first thirty seconds deciding which lines share a pattern. The chart almost always offers you one.
- Lines that move together. Group them: "A and B rose in parallel throughout."
- Lines that move oppositely. Group them: "A rose steadily while B declined over the same period."
- One dominant line. Give it a paragraph and group the rest.
- Several lines and no pattern. Say so in the overview and group by outcome: the risers, the fallers, and the flat ones.
That grouping decides both the overview sentence and the paragraph order. A candidate who starts writing sentences first produces accurate text with no shape, and "does not have a clear overview" is a criterion you can be failed on.
The overview
One or two sentences on the most striking feature of the whole chart, with no numbers.
- Good: "All three countries recorded growth over the period, but the rate of increase differed sharply, with A rising steadily while C remained broadly flat."
- Not an overview: "Country A rose from 2 million in 2010 to 6 million in 2020."
The second is a data sentence doing the body's job.
Language for movement
Rising: rose steadily, climbed gradually, increased sharply, saw a marked rise, went up from X to Y, more than doubled, surged.
Falling: declined gradually, fell sharply, dropped steadily, decreased, halved, dwindled, was almost unchanged.
No change: remained stable, stayed flat, levelled off, plateaued at around X, was virtually unchanged.
Fluctuation: fluctuated, rose and fell with no clear trend, varied between X and Y, showed no consistent pattern.
Timing: between 2010 and 2015, from 2010 to 2020, over the first half of the period, by the end of the period, prior to 2015.
Comparing two lines
- was almost twice as high as
- rose far more rapidly than
- the gap between them narrowed steadily
- the two converged at around X
- A and B tracked each other closely
- whereas A..., B...
- both increased, though B did so more sharply
- A overtook B in 2015 and remained ahead
Levelled off and plateaued are the two most useful phrases you can learn for this chart, because most real series rise for a while and then stop. Converged and diverged are the right words when two lines move toward or away from each other.
A structure that holds up
- Introduction, one sentence paraphrasing the question
- Overview, one or two sentences, no numbers
- Body one, the dominant line or the group that moves together
- Body two, the remaining lines, closed with a comparison
Target 140 to 190 words. When you are short, cut body detail, never the overview.
Six things that cost marks
- No overview. Required, and the cheapest thing to fix.
- Describing every line. You will run out of words and still have not grouped.
- Copying the question. Paraphrase it in the introduction.
- Opinion. "This demonstrates that governments should intervene" is out of scope.
- Wrong adverbs. "Significantly" on a two-percent change is a mismatch, and the examiner reads it as careless.
- No time references. "It increased" is vague; "between 2010 and 2015" is a description.
Practising it
Write the overview first, one sentence, no numbers, timed at a minute. Do that for a dozen line graphs and it stops being the part you forget, which is the entire point.
Self-marking does not work well here. The errors are the ones you cannot see while you are making them, so get one properly marked against the published descriptors.
Practise on a computer with the IELTS Practice Portal, which runs computer-delivered mock tests with a band calculator so you can see what a description like this actually scores.
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