Paraphrase is a very useful and necessary skill, because in both Task 1 and Task 2, you need to paraphrase the opening sentence again. This operation is especially easy in Task 1 because when you read the beginning of the article, you can immediately orient the small parts to paraphrase.

Basically, the steps to paraphrase 1 at the beginning of Task 1 are as follows:

B1: show = give information about = demonstrate = demonstrate

Step 2: If the topic is “the chart”, then rewrite it to be more specific, say “the first chart” or “the bar chart”

B3: If that table has many different “objects”, please specify how many objects. Example topic talk:

The chart below shows the amount of money per week spent on fast food in Britain.

See the part I underlined? Please write it down to see the types fast food what is that. I look at the graph there are 3 types fast food So I’ll rewrite it as: 3 different types of fast foods.

B4: Words of quantity like amount, number, population, percentage converted into how many/how much and vice versa.

B5: If there are years (eg 1900 – 2015), you can write from 1900 to 2015, or use the very useful phrase over the course of 115 years starting from 1900.

*** Watch more videos on how to write an opening essay for Ms. Thuy Dung’s Writing Task 1:

So there are the following things we have to paraphrase:

– the word “show”

– the word “chart”

– common noun

– amount

– time

Let’s paraphrase some topics, for example, I paraphrase the above topic first:

The chart below shows the amount of money per week spent on fast food in Britain.

=> The bar graph ILLUSTRATES how much money people in Britain spent per week on 3 different types of fast food.

I just paraphrased 4 parts as mentioned above, it’s really simple, isn’t it? Let’s do a few more examples to get used to:

first) The charts below show the results of a survey of adult education. The first chart shows the reasons why adults decide to study. The pie chart shows how people think the costs of adult education should be shared.

=> The bar graph demonstrates 7 different reasons why adults pursue education at their age.

=> The second chart shows how the surveyees think their education expenses should be allocated.

2) The table below shows the consumer durables (telephone, refrigerator, etc.) owned in Britain from 1972 to 1983.

=> The table illustrates the ownership rate of different home appliances in Britain over the course of 11 years starting from 1972.

This one needs some explanation. When I read the phrase consumer durables, I have no idea what it is, never seen it. But looking at the list, it’s full of refrigerators, televisions, washing machines, etc. so it’s the same as the word home appliances (Houseware).

Many of you wonder if the ownership rate is like this. In the table it says how much % of households own each item listed, so I created the cluster ownership rate. If you are more careful, you can write the changes in ownership rate, because every post has a time period, there is a change.

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