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

ones as well.

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

one of my videos very soon. See you later. Bye.