What's new on IELTS with Fiona

This problem has come up a lot recently in my IELTS Writing classes, so I'm trying to find ways to address it.

Basically it's a simple problem and there's a simple fix, but sometimes the language for describing percentage and number gets confused.

Remember - we don't know HOW MANY PEOPLE took part in this survey.

Maybe there were only 2 young people, and only 1 (50%) of them had problems making friends.

Maybe there were 100 old people, and 20 (20%) of them had problems making friends.

So you can't say that MORE young people had problems (= 20 old people vs just 2 young people)

This chart is about PROPORTION/PERCENTAGE, not numbers.

You may need to repeat "The proportion of ...." several times in order to be precise and accurate.