IELTS Writing Task 1: notice real examples

I was reading The Economist yesterday, and I noticed these sentences:

America's total student debt, at over $1.5trn, is larger than the national borrowing of most countries. It has quintupled in size since 2004, overtaking both borrowing on credit cards and car finance.

I've highlighted a few useful features in the two sentences:

1. adding a statistic between two commas using "at"
2. a comparative: larger than
3. cohesion (referencing) using the pronoun "it"
4. quintupled = increased fivefold
5. overtaking: you may be able to use this word when describing a graph
6. comparing and contrasting using "both... and..."

If you're reading articles in English, look out for real examples of the types of description that you might use for an IELTS task.

Comments

[niuxiufeng]

thank you simon,
great advice.

[Linh]

Thanks!

[Sajan]

First time I heard of the word ''quintuple'' and ''at'' between two commas .
Thanks Simon

[Anh Mai]

Thanks Simon.

You are always a trustful resource for my students to look for.

One tip for those students who want to use imitate the writing style of native speaker: be careful with "S-V, ING-". In this form, "-ING" refer back to the whole clause and the action of the action "-ING", most of the time, is the Subject of main clause.
If you do not notice this grammar point, you will write something very funny like the below sentence I gonna analyse in detail.

"Peter became CEO, increasing his salary significantly."
S: Peter
V: became
O: CEO
-ING: increasing....
It makes no sense that Peter "automatically" increases his salary, but what makes more sense here is Peter's promotion increases his salary.
One way to correct this sentence is to use absolute phrase.
"S-V, N phrase"
"Peter became CEO, a promotion that increased his salary significantly."

Bonus: we can play around with the sample Simon provided.
"America's student' debt has quintupled in size since 2004, overtaking both borrowing on credit cards and car finance."
= "America's student' debt has quintupled in size since 2004, A MONTROUS FINANCIAL BURDEN overtaking both borrowing on credit cards and car finance."
(in this play around sentence, -ING acts as an Adjective modifying "burden")

Anyone want further explanation feel free to text me. Hope this help.Happy learning.
Anh Mai
GMAT Trainer,

[Jason]

It has quintupled in size since 2004, overtaking both borrowing on credit cards and car finance.
I have a question why we use OVERTAKING (is it V-ing) after the comma. I has seen it several time but I dont know what kind of its structure.
Thanks Simon

[Anh Tung]

Thanks Simon,

As I known, the sentence
"It has quintupled in size since 2004, overtaking both borrowing on credit cards and car finance."

It is called as "V-ing clause", including 2 clauses. They describes 2 continuous actions with the same subject, so in this case, we can alleviate one subject.

[Yozkan]

Hi guys,

It’s more complicated than you thought. Here is the link for (comma+V-ing)

https://e-gmat.com/blogs/usage-verb-ing-modifiers-part-1/

I hope it’ll help you guys.

[Thi Kim Oanh Tran]

To this morning number of COVID-19 cases are 255 peoples in Vietnam, in which there are 128 of peoples who have been treated well again. Pretend to have 14 patients more will be published are well again. The government and Vietnam people have done our best to prevent the spread of the epidemic. Incent, We are controlling infected people very well. Hopefully, the disease epidemic will be the end soon let the people were turned to normal life.

[Nguyễn Huyền]

Hello Simon. I have a question.
Should we use "as is observed" to start a overview sentence in Ielts task 1.
Hope that you wil answer my question. Thank you.