The Olympics medal table-Task 1

The Olympics medal table

This lesson looks at possibly the hardest of the academic task one diagrams – the table. I have taken the Olympics medal table – a difficult table to describe because it contains so much data. If you can accurately describe this table, then IELTS tasks should be easier. In many ways, the key is to allow yourself as much thinking time as possible – if you understand the table, then it is much easier to summarise it.

To help you along the way, I suggest a 3/4 step thinking process that should allow you to analyse the table and give you some tasks to test your skills, before showing you my sample answer with writing notes.

Test yourself before you start

You will find my sample answer below and my description of how I wrote it. A suggestion is that you try and describe the table yourself before looking at my version and to compare my answer with yours.

Understanding the problem – too much information

The problem is that this table gives you 50 pieces of data. You cannot include all this information – the idea is to select and summarise the main points and make relevant comparisons. This means that before you write you need to spend time analysing and understanding the data. This is normally harder in tables as they are the least visual of all the diagrams – you need to look at just numbers.

A possible solution

Numbers can be confusing. So here is a possible solution. It helped me write my answer and it is a model that could/should work for most tables. It means doing two things:

1. deciding how to organise your answer – find two main topic paragraphs – the key ideas

2. looking at the extremes and how you would group information together – the main points and the comparisons

Finding paragraph topics – the key ideas

You will almost always want to organise your report into two main topic paragraphs. This means that each paragraph should be about one idea. So, the very strong suggestion is that you spend time deciding what those topics should be. They are normally “big things”. If you don’t get them, it may be because you think they are too obvious.

Task

Look at the medals table above and decide how you would organise the paragraphs. Think about how the table is organised. Your report wants to mirror the organisation of the table itsel

Noting the extremes

Important information to be included almost always includes the ideas of “the most” and “the least” – the extremes. This helps organise your report and is a first step to making some comparisons.

Task

Look at the table and answer these questions. In some ways, the key to doing this is to understand that you may be looking at more than country at once. Also. as you look at the total medal count, you may also want to make some comparison/contrast with the gold medal count.

1. Which country or countries won the most gold medals?
2. Which country or countries won the fewest gold medals?
3. Which country or countries won the most medals overall?
4. Which country or countries won the fewest?

Grouping similar data together

The next step I consider is how to group countries together. This is necessary from two points of view:

1. it helps make comparisons – part of the task
2. it allows you to summarise more effectively – again part of the task

Task

Look at the table above and decide:

1. which countries you would group together when describing the gold medals
2. which countries you would group together when describing the total me

What are the details to include?

The key is that before you start to write, you should have some key points you want to emphasise. If you have worked your way through the tasks, you should have some idea about these. You will find my ideas

See my answer

This table shows the ten most successful countries in the 2012 Olympics, from it we can see the number of gold, silver and bronze medals each country won. It is of note that the ranking of the nations is organised according to the number of gold medals and not the total amount of medals won.

In terms of gold medals, the two most successful nations were the USA and China which won 46 and 38 golds respectively. After Great Britain and Russia in third and fourth place with 29 and 24 golds, there was a significant gap to the other nations (South Korea, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary and Australia), all of which won between 13 and 7 gold medals only.

When we look at the total medals won, the United States was still the most successful nation with over 100 medals in comparison to Hungary’s total of only 17 medals. It is also notable how Australia rose from tenth place in gold medals to sixth place in total medals. Russia with 82 medals overall, however, was only slightly behind China in second place, whileGreat Britain dropped to fourth place with 65 medals. Of the other nations, it is notable how almost half of South Korea’s and Hungary’s total medals were golds, whereas only between one quarter and one fifth of Germany’s and Australia’s medals were gold. France and Italy, in contrast, won an almost equal proportion of golds, silvers and bronzes.

In conclusion, we can say that the Olympic medal table shows how total medal count and the proportion of gold, silver and bronze medals varied between the ten most successful nations.