PTE Describe Image – Surprisingly Simple But Powerful Technique

If you find the Describe Image section of the PTE Academic to be a challenging question, you’re not the only one.  Most people(including me) find this to be a challenging question to answer.

You get a random image/graph, get only 25 seconds to study it and are expected to talk about it for 30-40 seconds! It’s not the easiest task to do. In fact, some of the questions can be really confusing and can leave you overwhelmed.

So how do you overcome it?

But when you look at an image/graph for the first time, it can get difficult. You need to extract meaningful information from the graph/image within a short amount of time.

 

Even if you can come with ideas on what to say, transforming those ideas into meaningful sentences is often the hard part. This process can often leave us with hesitations while we speak, which is not good.

 

So how do we solve this problem?

 

The secret is having a set of pre-defined sentence structure or templates. But not just any sentence structure. The structures need to be flexible enough to be used in a wide variety of situations. You do not necessarily need to use these structures all the time, but it can be a handy tool to fall back on when you are stuck or are not sure what to say.

Below is an example of a structure that you can use along with examples:

• Introduction: (Use labels and axis in graph here)
  The given line chart/bar graph/pie chart/image shows/compares, “……”

 

• Main Body: (fill with high/low/variable movement seen)
  By studying the graph/image it can be clearly seen that, “……”

 

Below are a few examples of how to use them

In conclusion, this a very informative graph that tells us about, “the number of people migrating to Australia and the purpose of the migration program”.

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This approach can be used to tackle almost any describe image questions that you get in the exam, even if it is a very complex image. If it’s a complex image the key is not to get too lost in getting lost in what you are going to say. Just pick up anything that stands out and talk about that.

If you plan to use this in the exam be sure to practice it a few times. You can even come up with your own sentence structures. You can find more such structures in my Ebook available here.

Although the describe image is a difficult section in the PTE Academic, the more you practice the easier it gets. Additionally, use of such sentence structures can make it easier.

Good luck!!

Steven