Expressing the Movement of a Line

Verbs Nouns
Rise (to) a rise
Increase (to) an increase
Go up to  
Grow (to) Growth
Climb (to) a climb
Peak (at) (reach) a peak (at)
   
Fall (to) a fall (of)
Decline (to) a decline (of)
Decrease (to) a decrease (of)
Dip (to) a dip (of)
Drop (to) a drop (of)
Go down (to)  
Reduce (to) a reduction (of)
   
Level out a leveling out
No change no change
Remain stable (at)  
Remain steady (at)  
Stay (at)  
Stay constant (at)  
   
Adjectives Adverbs
Dramatic Dramatically
Sharp Sharply
Huge Hugely
Steep Steeply
Substantial Substantially
Considerable Considerably
Significant Significantly
Moderate Moderately
Slight Slightly
Minimal Minimally
   
Describing the Speed of a Change
Adjectives Adverbs
Rapid Rapidly
Sudden Suddenly
Steady Steadily
Gradual Gradually
Slow Slowly

Sample 1

The line graph shows the wheat export 1985-1990. The vertical axis shows the millions of tons of wheat
exports and the horizontal axis shows the years. The red line represents Canada, the green line
represents European community and the blue line represents Australia.
As can be seen in the graph, Canada reached a peak in 1988 at 25 millions of tons, but the export
dropped dramatically in 1989 at 15 millions of tons. It went up in 1990.
In 1985 the wheat export in Australia stood at 15 millions of tons, and there was a slight increase in
1986. The export dropped from 1987 to 1989, and from 1989 to 1990, it remained constant.
The wheat export of European Community stood at 18 millions of tons in 1985, but this figure fell in
1986 and increased slowly from 1987 to 1988. Finally, the wheat export of European Community
reached a peak at 21 million of tons in 1990.
Based on the graph, it shows that each country had different pattern of graphs. The highest point of
wheat exports was at 25 million tons in 1988 and the lowest point exports was at 10 million tons in
1989.
The chart shows how many male and female students were studying full-time or part-time in
further education in Britain between 1970/71 and 1990/91. Overall, the vast majority of students
were part-time and there were more students in 1990/91 than in 1970/71, especially women.
Looking firstly at part-time versus full-time study, it is clear that most students were part-time in
each year shown in the chart. The number of part-time students was over 700,000 per gender
per year, going as high as 1.1 million, whereas for full-time study the number was between
70,000 and 250,000.
Moving on to look at gender differences, numbers of female students increased in both full-time
and part-time education whereas the number of males in part-time education decreased. For
example, there were 70,000 full-time and about 750,000 part-time female students in 1970/71,
but by 1990/91 these numbers had risen to over 200,000 full-time and around 1.1 million part-
time. The number of male full-time students also went up from around 100,000 in 1970/71 to
over 200,000 in 1990/91, whereas for part-time study their numbers went down from 1 million in
1970/71 to around 850,000 in 1980/81, before rising slightly about 900,000 in 1990/91.