Reaching a peak in IELTS Task 1

Posted by pakguru on May 21st, 2016 | 5 responses | collocation, EAP, grammar, GTC, IELTS, line graphs, prepositions, Task 1, vocabulary, writing

In general, the 6pm news reached its peak for almost 5 million viewers per day in the first month.

This is actually quite communicative and in IELTS this sentence might give you a satisfactory score for TA. However, the language problems would leave you with a much lower score for GRA and for CC.

1. It doesn’t make sense to signal this statement ‘In general‘, because it’s not general. It features data values taken from the x and y axes of the graph. Better to put this information in the detail section of your essay and signal it “In detail,“.
2. You need to treat ‘reach a peak‘ as a phrasal verb. If you want to change the tense – and the tense will most likely be past simple tense – then you can modify ‘reach‘ (past: ‘reached a peak‘). Otherwise don’t mess with ‘a‘ and don’t mess with ‘peak‘.
3. The preposition ‘for‘ is not right.

So, if you really are making a general statement, do this:

• In general, the popularity of the 6pm news reached a peak in the first month.

If you want to mention detail, then do this:

• In detail, the 6pm news reached a peak of almost 5 million viewers per day in the first month.

Pay careful attention to this pattern:

something + reached a peak (+ of + value x) (+ time expression)

If you don’t believe me, check out these examples!
And whatever you do, don’t write ‘reached the peak‘! That applies to climbers only, where ‘the‘ refers to the mountain that they happen to be climbing at the time!

5 responses to “Reaching a peak in IELTS Task 1”

1. Supreet kaur says:

   September 26, 2020 at 12:40 am

   Thanks tutor …its really helpful

   Reply
2. DavidEHP says:

   October 13, 2021 at 11:37 pm

   Junarto’s salary reached a peak of Rp 500 millions per month in his 50’s.

   Reply
   • pakguru says:

     October 13, 2021 at 11:44 pm

     Nice. You’ll hate me for this. Rp = Rupiah, which is an irregular noun. It doesn’t have an ‘s’ when it’s plural. Here it is plural and it is the main noun in the noun phrase. Other nouns in this noun phrase should not be pluralised:

     500 million Rupiah = Rp 500 million

     Reply
     • DavidEHP says:

       October 14, 2021 at 4:04 am

       Hmm… interesting. What about USD or Pound, are they the same?

       Reply
       • DavidEHP says:

         October 14, 2021 at 6:07 am

         Woopss… please ignore the last message..

         Reply