Hi there, this is Fiona from IELTS with Fiona and the Members Academy.
In today's quick grammar lesson we're looking at a common mistake that I noticed when we were practising pie charts in the Members Academy.
If you're listening to this on the podcast, there's also a YouTube video so you can look at the images as well.
But it's pretty simple to describe them to you.
So this is a mixed chart and it's about the location of dance classes and the types of dance classes which are held in a town in Australia.
Because it's a mixed chart, there's one pie chart and one bar chart.
And we're going to focus on the pie chart today because that's the one that caused the most problems.
So if you're watching this on YouTube, I'd like you to pause the video please, and look at the information about private studios.
Check the title location of dance classes for private studios.
It says 48%.
And think about how you would describe that 48%.
As you're doing that, I'll talk the listeners through this pie chart.
There are four places where dance classes are held.
So we can see private studios is 48%.
Then there's community halls, 18%.
School halls, 24%.
And college studios, 10%.
So immediately a few things stand out and I've highlighted that in yellow for you.
But I'd like to know, how you would describe that almost half of the pie chart.
Here are two options and please tell me which one is correct.
They are both grammatically correct, but this is the area where I see lots of people get very mixed up.
So listen carefully.
Remember the pie chart has 48% private studios.
So which one is correct?
A. Almost half of the students attended classes in private studios.
Or B. Almost half of the classes were held in private studios.
So that's either half the students went to classes in private studios or half of the classes were held in private studios you might be thinking well that's active that's passive don't focus on that now focus on is it about the students or is it about the classes and go back to the title it says the location of dance classes so the correct answer is this one almost half of the classes were held in private studios because this is all about where the classes were it's not about the number of students who went to the classes in fact we don't know that and this causes a lot of problems which i'll talk about today before we do that i've just got a question about whether you should choose present tense or past tense for this pie chart all we know is that it's about students who are currently attending dance classes.
You might naturally think present simple because there's no past tense mentioned in the graph, but actually both are okay.
I think if you choose one and stick to it you'll be fine.
So you could say almost half of the classes are held in private studios, or almost half of the classes were held in private studios.
Now arguably, if you're using past tense throughout, that might show your confidence and flexibility with using a more difficult tense, but both are okay.
So let's come back now to that problem of seeing the graph and immediately thinking it's about the people attending.
I looked online and you can see one example here of a model answer which got it wrong.
And this model says private studios account for the greatest proportion of people attending dance classes.
That's wrong.
It continued to say Nearly half of the participants attend dance classes in private studios.
Again, it's wrong.
We don't know how many participants attend these dance classes.
Somebody actually pointed this out.
They corrected them.
But the teacher just said proportion of participants is different from proportion of people.
And it's not.
Participants and people are exactly the same.
So that doesn't make much sense.
So what can we say?
Let's have a look at some examples.
We've agreed that it's about the classes.
So you can say almost half of the classes were held in private studios.
That's nice.
It's passive.
A synonym for that could be Just under half of the classes took place in private studios.
Yes, that's active.
It's a nice alternative to the passive were held.
A synonym maybe for were held.
You could say over half of the classes were hosted in public venues.
So I've grouped there.
Community halls, school halls, college studios, it's almost half when you add them together.
So just over half were hosted in public venues, whereas the other half were hosted in private studios.
Now, to avoid again talking about people, you could say Private studios were the most common choice of venue hosting nearly half of the dance classes.
And then you could say private studios were the most popular location though I have put an asterisk there, because popular is perhaps the word that counts causes the confusion and the mistakes.
Because what does popular mean?
Well, it either means that most people like that location or it means that most of the people holding or hosting the classes like that location.
And this is where the confusion comes, I think.
I'll explain a little more in a minute.
Just let's finish with possible answers.
So only 10% of the classes were conducted, again, synonym, in college studios.
And college studios were the least used.
So I didn't say least popular classes.
I said the least used or the least utilised, more formal.
But that's all we know is how much these places were used as location.
However, I think it's also possible to say college studios were the least preferred or least popular location.
Let me explain that popular again.
I've put it here as a kind of danger word.
And the reason is that, if you imagine, let's just imagine that there are 100 classes in total and we know that 48 of those classes are held private studios.
So that means 48 classes, but there may only be one student in each class we just don't know.
So that's 48 students.
College studios, on the other hand, maybe they have 10 classes imagine 10 is 10 classes, but it's a college, So maybe they have a hundred students per class, which makes a thousand students.
So we could then say that most students preferred to go to college studios.
We simply don't know because it's not about numbers of students.
And that is what's causing the problem here.
So overall, Let's have a look at a few options.
I would say a band five, the most basic version would be to say private studios were 48 percent.
That really doesn't tell us anything.
It's not enough information, but it does give us a number and it gives us a past tense.
So it's a band five.
Band 6 gives us simple, understandable information.
Private studios hosted 48% of the classes.
It's grammatically and factually correct.
Moving up one perhaps, instead of saying 48.
It's much better to use words if you can, because it shows that you can be approximate.
Almost half, just under half, of the classes took place.
And then just going one step further, I recommend that you use these, I call them MARC verbs.
MARC stands for M, A, R and C. M is made up, accounted for, represented.
And they're all again on that next slide where I've talked about this before in a separate video.
If you can memorise M A R C, they provide a lot of variety when you're describing pie charts.
And remember, pie charts are all about percentage and not about numbers.
So always go back and look at the title of the pie chart and remember In this one you can see that the bar chart is all about number of students.
So then you can say how popular each type of class was.
I hope that makes sense.
Please do let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks for listening and thanks for watching.
Bye bye.
