Episode 4

【【✏ Writing-Wise Series ✒】

[Standardized English exams]

In quite a lot of situations:

😥   when you look at a pie chart, percentages are not available (just like what you see from the picture here) to let you know whether they are close to any of the fractions I discussed in the previous issue.

😥   when you are faced with a bar chart 📊 or a table of figures, the numbers you see may not necessarily be percentages, but just exact numbers – some of you may say your math is not good enough to deduce how close each percentage given is to which fractions (especially when calculators are not allowed in an exam setting).

In fact, you may consider using the following expressions to represent proportions, i.e. how large or how small each number is, regardless of any percentage or fraction 😎.

🔴   almost all … / nearly all … / …

🟠   an overwhelming/outright majority of …

    (N.B. You might have heard of “a landslide majority”, but this phrase is usually used in describing election results 📥, e.g. “win by a landslide” or “landslide victory”.)

🟡   a large/great/sizeable majority of … / most of the … / …

🟢   a/the majority of … / a lot of … / lots of … / a host of … / …

🔵   a bare/narrow/slight/slim majority of … (= just over 50%)

🟣   a large/significant/sizeable minority (= just below 50%)

🟤   some … / a few … / a small number/percentage/minority of … / a/the minority of …

With the combination of the use of the above expressions and the representation of fractions introduced in the previous issue, rather than simply a plain list of exact percentages or numbers, your presentation is beyond doubt sensible to your readers ✌.

Speaking of fractions, as a final note, I have to add something to how to write on fractions last time.  Besides the various introduced last time, you may simply say “¼” as “one out of four” or “one in four” while “⅖” as “two out of five” or “two in five”.  In other words, the prepositions “out of” and “in” can also add variety to your statistical representation 👍.