IELTS VOCABULARY: 17 Direction Verbs for Graphs (IELTS Writing Task 1)
Hey, welcome back. In today's lesson, we are going to be looking at directional
verbs. These kind of words. Okay? Well, why are they important? Really important
words, if you're doing for example, IELTS Writing Task 1, where you have to
comment on a graph or a bar chart, because these words here help you to
comment on the patterns you see in graphs. But beyond that, beyond the sort
of writing exam skills, these are words that you will hear all the time in the
news, reading the paper, talking about the relative rise and fall of countries
and businesses, fortunes, okay. So these are words you will hear all the time. So
what we have are these words, and we have four different sort of trends in
these graphs here. So we can see that here, we have a slow increase, and in
this one, we have a steep or quick increase. Here, it's going down, a
slight decrease. And here we have a steep decrease like a steep hill is
going down quickly. So what I'd like you to do at home is try and find one word
for each of these four graphs. Okay, I'm going to stand here. And I want you to
have a go at that. So you could just write down four words for me like first
word, second word, third word, fourth word... which ones are you going to go
for? Have a quick look... we got decline, slow gain, drop, increase,
rocket, plummet, double, full, halve, level off, triple, recover, decrease,
fluctuate, improve, peak, rise, and jump.
Okay, I forgot to say that Adam has also made a similar video that you might want
to check out after this one, which goes a bit more into the details. But we're
going to continue now. So we need one that shows us sort of a slight increase.
Okay, so I'm seeing increase there. Let's write it in. So we've got... we
could describe this as increasing. Yeah, let's rub that off from there. And we
want a couple more that mean like sort of slight increase. Maybe "improve" we
could use? Did you write that one down at home? Improve? Yep. "Its performance
was improving." Maybe you'd have an adverb as well like improving gradually,
or steadily -- yeah? Means at the same rate.
Okay, we've got "improve". Have we got any other slow improvement? Yeah, we
could use this one here. Rise. Yep. Rising, getting more going up. Okay.
Yeah, and probably "slow gain" we could put in this one too. Haven't got any
more room to write it but slow gain would go there.
Okay, this one is a steeper, a quicker improvement. So we're looking for one
that's going up fast. Rocket. Yeah. The rocket going up into space. Let's have
rocket here. Something else going up really fast. Look, "triple". So it's
more than doubling. Because it's going tok tok tok, it's suddenly going three
times more. Okay? So "triple" is a very quick improvement or increase, "triple".
What do we do if we jump? We go up? It happens quickly. Yep. So jump is a quick
improvement or increase. Let's put "jump" in there. Okay. Right. Now we're
looking for going down. Decline. Yep. Declined. Go down. The opposite of
incline. If you'd watched my lesson on prefixes, I did one about the prefix
"de". So that video tells you more about that. Decline. Decrease. Did you have
that one at home? Which one did you pick? For here? Maybe leave a comment.
Under the video. Decrease. Dupa dupa dupa-do.
Any other going down? Shout out to me. I can't hear you. Yep, "fall", we can have
"fall" -- going down. "Halve" is goin down. It's the opposite of double. S
it's going from here to half what i was. So which is more like halvi
g? Difficult to tell. But yeah, halvin is getting two times less.
"Drop" we could put here. Yep. Getting less -- drop. If you jump out of the
plane, you drop until the parachute kicks in. Okay. "Plummet" means to go
down very quickly. "Plummet" goes there. Double. Probably we'll put in this one.
I think that's more like two times than this one. So double could go there. And
then we've got these four words. That didn't seem to really fit anywhere. So,
what we need to do now at home is to try and make the pattern just like with your
finger or with a pen in a book. What shape would the line do for recover?
Would it be like this? Would it be like this? Would it be like this? What do you
think "recover" looks like. So, "recover" means to get better. So things
are going bad. And then they get better again, okay? To recover.
"Fluctuates" -- you familiar with that word? Fluctuate. It sounds like a busy
word, doesn't it? Fluctuate is like taka taka taka. Goes from up to down to up to
down to up to down to up. Okay? To change.
"Peak", what's a mountain peak? What's the opposite of a peak? The opposite of
a peak is a "trough". So mountain peak is up here. And the trough is down at
the bottom. So to peak means to go up. And then down again. This is the peak so
it can be a noun and a verb. The trough is just a noun, it means like the bottom
bit down here. Right? "To level off". Hmm... "level". This means we've been
going up but then it stays the same. Okay, just wanted you to know those four
So now we're going to look at actually using some of these words in a sentence
context. Okay, so our four graphs and four example sentences. I'm not going to
go into a huge amount of detail about what's written on the axes, I'm more
looking to use the direction of verbs to make a basic comment on the general
pattern going on in each of the graphs. Our first one: sales increased from
nought to five sales per month, between January and September. So when I use
"increase", an "increase from... to", okay, well, you can can have also an
increase of. So this is nought to five per month. Okay, so if I was writing
about it, you'd probably put that into the sentence too.
Second one: Temperatures rocketed from naught to 40 degrees, naught to 40
degrees. We don't know what's in the axes, we're just seeing what's there.
Visitor numbers fell. So we have an irregular verb. And this is the
participle, "fell" from whatever the number is here to whatever it is here.
And I guess this would be time in this axes again. "Consumption" -- meaning how
much was consumed, "consumption of mangoes plummeted". Yeah, it went down
very, very quickly. And then again, you'd put the statistics from whatever
this number is here to whatever this number is here. Okay.
So "increased from", "rocketed from", "fell from", "plummeted from" and "to".
Okay. All of these directional verbs work in a very similar way. But you do
need to know what the past tense form of the verb is. Okay. Hope this has been
useful to you. Do have a go at the quiz now and hopefully we'll see that your
knowledge of directional verbs has rocketed -- hope so. Check out the next