IELTS language bank: Quantifying Language

Every Task 1 report and a large share of Task 2 essays depend on describing amounts that are neither exactly countable nor safely left vague, and this is exactly where candidates fall back on "a lot," "many," "a bit," and "some" far more often than the language actually allows. The problem isn't that these words are wrong — they are simply too blunt to do the job a precise data description or a well-supported argument needs. "A lot of people supported the change" and "the vast majority of people supported the change" are both grammatically fine, but only the second tells a reader anything about scale, and Task 1 in particular is scored partly on whether the description matches the actual data with genuine precision rather than approximate gesturing. This bank works through quantifying language for large and small proportions, near-half splits, frequency, degree and intensity, and the distinctions that separate genuinely precise description from vague filler dressed up in longer words.

For large proportions, "the vast majority of," "the overwhelming majority of," "nearly all," "the bulk of," and "the lion's share of" all signal a share well above half, though with slightly different flavours: "the overwhelming majority" and "nearly all" both push toward the very top of the range, close to unanimous, while "the bulk of" and "the lion's share of" suit a large but not extreme majority, more naturally applied to money, resources, or time than to people: "The bulk of the marketing budget was allocated to digital advertising." "A significant proportion of" and "a substantial minority of" sit in an interesting middle zone — large enough to matter, but explicitly not a majority — and are two of the most underused phrases on this list precisely because they resist the pull toward either "most" or "few."

For small proportions, "a small minority of," "a negligible proportion of," "very few," "barely any," and "a handful of" cover a range from merely small down to functionally zero. Precision matters more here than it first appears: "negligible" implies a share close enough to zero to be dismissed as insignificant, while "a small minority" allows for a share that is still clearly minor but large enough to be worth mentioning as an exception. "A handful of" works well for a genuinely small, countable number of categories or respondents rather than a percentage, and reads more naturally applied to discrete items: "A handful of countries have adopted the policy so far." Mixing these up — calling a 22% share "negligible" when it is merely a minority, or calling a 2% share "a small minority" when it is closer to negligible — undercuts the precision the whole point of this vocabulary is meant to deliver.

For a genuine near-half split, "approximately half," "just under half," "a little over half," "roughly equal proportions," and "a near-even split" avoid the flattening effect of writing "about half" for two data points that are actually different from each other — 48% and 52% are not identical, and a report that calls both "about half" has thrown away real information the chart provides. "Just under" and "just over" are specifically useful because they signal which direction of the midpoint a figure falls on without requiring the exact decimal, which matters in Task 1 when the chart doesn't make an exact figure easy to read at a glance.