One of the writing questions on the Duolingo English test is to write about a photo in
one minute. And this is challenging for a lot of students, because writing about a photo is simply
just hard. And you've got to do it in one minute. So extra hard, but there are actually just four
simple things you need to know to describe a photo effectively. So in this video, I will show you
these four simple things, and I'll give you a bonus tip at the end. So the first thing you need
to know is how to begin your answer. And I recommend you start by using a general summary
where you write one sentence describing the photo. In general, this is quite simple and a good way to
start your answer. Let me show you an example of what I mean. So we'll use this photo. And a
general summary looks something like this. This photo shows a teacher teaching a group of young
school students. Another example. This is an image of a group of students and a teacher in a modern
classroom. These general summaries are a great way to begin your answer, because they're fairly easy
to write. And it means that you can write one sentence quite quickly. And we usually use the
present simple or present continuous to do this. There are lots of ways to begin your general
summary in these two examples are used this photo shows and this is an image of but there are more
ways you can begin, let me show you here. You can say this is a picture of this picture shows this
image depicts in this photograph there is or there are, I highly recommend that you memorize these
statements and you practice typing them quickly. Remember, you only have one minute to do this
question type. So if you practice typing these statements out quickly, then when you take your
real Duolingo test, you can do it and save some valuable seconds. Now let's move on to look at how
you can write some more details in your answer. To get a good score, you will need to put some
details in your description. And there are a few ways to do this. So let's take a look at these
now. One way to add detail to your answers is to describe the actions of the people or the subjects
in the photo. Most photos will have a subject either a person, an animal, a vehicle, something
like that. Let's take an example with this photo. Here. The main subject is the teacher. So I will
describe what he's doing. He is standing in front of an interactive screen and gesturing politely. I
might also want to talk about these students, I could say the students are listening carefully to
what the teacher is saying. Even though this photo was taken in the past, when we describe it, we
typically use the present tenses and when describing the actions of the people or subjects
we will use the present continuous like in this example, I said he is standing in front of an
interactive screen and gesturing politely. In this sentence, I use the present continuous tense. So
describing the actions of the people or subjects in the photo is one way to go into detail. But
it's not the only way. The next way is to describe the location of things, this is a great way to add
detail to your answer. And to do this, you're going to want to use prepositional phrases.
prepositional phrases are good to include in your answer because they are quite an advanced grammar
type. Let's take a look at an example. The teacher is in front of the students who are sat in rows,
and there is a large interactive screen behind him. In this example, the two prepositional
phrases are in front of and behind. Another example, there is an interactive screen to the
left of the teacher and a whiteboard directly behind him. So you can see how describing the
location using prepositional phrases can add lots of details to your description. There are lots of
prepositional phrases you can use. Here are a bunch of examples. I recommend you take a
screenshot of this and study these and practice using them in your descriptions. But that's not
all. You can also do one more thing which is quite advanced to describe your photo. And this is to
make a speculation or to make a guess.
So making a speculation on the photo means that you're guessing what is happening based on the
photo. So for example, here is my speculation. He must be an effective teacher as the young students
are focusing well on the lesson. So do I know 100% That he is an effective teacher? No, I don't I'm
just guessing or making a speculation based on the photo. But as I mentioned, your speculation or
your gas should be closely related to what's happening in the photo. Here's another example.
There is a large interactive screen behind the teacher that is likely being used for an
educational game. Again, I don't know 100% That is being used for the educational game. I'm just
making a guess or a speculation based on the evidence in the photo. There are lots of grammar
structures you can use to make speculation. And a good thing is that typically these grammar
structures are considered quite advanced. So if you use them well in your answer, it could boost
your score. And here are some of these grammar structures. So to make a speculation about why is
something happening now, so in the present, you can use modal verbs like must, may, might or can't
be, you can also use other words and expressions, you might also want to speculate about something
that's happened in the past, but effect in the present. In that case, you can use might have,
must have or could not have. These are some examples of modal verbs. There are more, but these
are the basic ones. So those are things you can write about in your photo. But now I have a bonus
tip for you. And it is to always try to use descriptive language words like adjectives,
adverbs and prepositions. Using these words will give you extra points because vocabulary is on the
scoring criteria. And in my examples, so far, I have used lots of these words, but let me show you
one more time to remind you. So this is a full answer and the descriptive language or descriptive
words are in orange. So we have young in front of politely effective Well, these are all adjectives,
adverbs and prepositions, which you can use to describe your photo in more detail. Another
example here the descriptive language is modern in front of large behind educational, again, useful
descriptive words to describe a photo and boost your score for this question type. So that's how
you describe a photo but now you need to practice so I recommend you watch this video here to see
lots of photos with sample answers. This will be a great way to practice so I'll see you in this
video.