Writing Part B: overview before numbers, hedge before cause
Part B presents a chart for a city of 2.4 million people, 2018–2023. E-bike sales (thousand units): 12, 19, 34, 58, 74, 85. Bus trips (million): 210, 206, 152, 141, 145, 148. The prompt asks for a 160–200-word essay interpreting the chart. Song Jia has 35 minutes. Her draft opens: 'As is vividly shown in the chart, e-bike sales increased while bus trips decreased, which indicates that people care more about the environment.' She then lists all twelve figures in sequence. She believes more numbers means more detail and therefore a higher content score. She plans to close with 'Only in this way can our city become better', a sentence she uses in every essay.
1. Rewrite her opening as an overview plus a selection of key features. Justify what you keep and what you drop.
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Model opening: The chart traces two contrasting trends in a city of 2.4 million between 2018 and 2023. E-bike sales rose more than sixfold, from 12 to 85 thousand units, while bus trips fell by roughly a third, from 210 to 148 million. The sharpest shift came in 2020, when bus use dropped from 206 to 152 million in a single year, and bus travel recovered only marginally thereafter.
Kept: the start and end values (or multiples), the 2020 inflection, and the weak 2022–23 recovery - these are the features that carry the story. Dropped: 34, 58 and 74, which lie on the same straight trend and add nothing.
Rule: an overview states the pattern and the relationship between the series, ideally with no numbers or at most two; the body supplies three or four figures that support the comparison. Twelve numbers is not detail - it is a data dump, and raters recognise it as an absence of selection.
2. Critique the causal claim in her draft and propose a hedged alternative that keeps the essay's point.
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The chart shows co-variation only. It contains nothing about environmental attitudes, fuel prices, bus service frequency, fares or remote work, so which indicates that people care more about the environment is an unsupported cause and a value judgement dressed as a finding.
Hedged alternative: This pattern is consistent with a shift away from public transport, though the chart alone cannot show why; plausible factors include service reductions and changing travel habits.
Note the toolkit: suggests, may, might, is consistent with, one possible explanation is. Keep one causal sentence at most, and mark it explicitly as speculation - 也许 / 可能 / 一种解释是. This is also where a good essay earns its analysis marks: it shows awareness of the limits of the data, which is exactly what the task rewards. Overclaiming is penalised twice, once for logic and once for the tone of certainty that native raters read as immaturity.
3. Plan the 160–200 words and replace the stock closing sentence.
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Allocation:
- Paragraph 1 - overview, about 40 words, both series and the direction of the relationship.
- Paragraph 2 - two or three supported comparisons with figures, about 70 words: the 2020 break, the sixfold rise in e-bikes, the partial bus recovery.
- Paragraph 3 - implication, hedged, about 40 words. Total 150–170, comfortably inside the range.
Evidence: length is a ceiling, not a target; a tight 165 words beats a padded 199, and padding is the usual cause of lost coherence marks.
Closing: replace Only in this way can our city become better - a memorised, content-free inversion that raters have seen thousands of times - with something tied to the data, e.g. If the trend continues, the city may need to decide whether to subsidise bus services or to redesign them around e-bike journeys. It performs the same closing function while remaining specific to this chart, and it avoids the template sentences that examiners explicitly discount.