The pie chart shows why agricultural land in America has become less productive. The table shows how these causes affected the three regions in the Americas.
Summarise the information reporting the important features and make comparisons where relevant.

Answer

The pie chart shows the causes of land degradation (deforestation, over-cultivation, over-grazing and other causes) in North, Central and South America, while the bar chart shows the percentage of land degraded in America by cause and region and the total percentage of land degraded.

The pie chart shows that over-grazing makes up 35% of land degradation while deforestation and overgrazing are responsible for 32% and 27% of land degradation, respectively. Other causes of land degradation make up 8% of the total degradation.

Central America has by far the highest level of land degradation at 13.8%,which is caused by deforestation (6.2%), over-cultivation (4.9%) and over grazing (2.3%). Approximately 13% of land in South America is degraded and is caused by deforestation (6.3%) with smaller contributions from over-grazing (4.4%) and over-cultivation (2.3%). North America has by far the lowest level of
land degradation at 5.8%, which is mainly due to over-cultivation (3.7%) and overgrazing (1.8%). Deforestation made up only 0.3% of land degradation in North America.

Essay notes

This question includes both a pie chart and a bar chart that allows the question to be logically divided into two parts. The introduction describes the high level content of the two data sets including the forms of the data (pie chart and a bar chart), a suitable title, the breakdown of the types of degradation and is presented in percentage form rather than as absolute values. It should be noted that because the pie chart is presented first in the question it should always be described first in the response.

The first body paragraph describes the pie chart and because there are only four data points, all can be listed and they are described in order from highest to lowest value.

The second body paragraph describes the bar chart. The bar chart describes the overall percentage of land degradation in each region as well as the breakdown of that degradation. Since the total land degradation totals are highest, they are described first in each case followed by the breakdown of the data by degradation type. Similarly, Central America is described first because it has the
highest level of land degradation, and is followed by the other regions in order of the percentage of land degraded.

There is very little data provided in the question so every data point is described. Initially, the last sentence was not included in the essay because the percentage of deforestation was so small it was considered unimportant and also because it can be calculated from the other data that was presented.However, adding this sentence increases the essay length from 155 to 166 words ensuring that it more comfortably exceeds the minimum essay length.