Formulas, Charts, and Word Problems: Turning Math Into Clear English

A student was presenting a research summary in class. The slide showed a tidy formula: A = πr². He pointed at it and said, "A equals pi r two." The room paused. His professor smiled and corrected gently: "A equals pi r squared." It was a one-syllable difference, but it meant the difference between sounding fluent and sounding like a student reading symbols off a screen. Formulas, charts, and word problems all live in the same neighborhood — they look like math, but in spoken English, they need words. Knowing those words turns a slide into a story.

Why This Matters

Quantitative English shows up in lectures, business meetings, lab reports, news bulletins, and almost every test that measures speaking and writing. TOEFL integrated tasks, IELTS Writing Task 1, and many corporate interviews ask you to describe charts in plain prose. Engineering, finance, and science classes assume you can read an equation aloud as if it were a sentence. If you only know the symbols, you can solve the problem but not explain it. If you know the words too, you can teach, present, and persuade — which is what real fluency looks like in a quantitative field.

If you have not seen Percent, Percentage, and Percentage Points: Small Words, Big Mistakes yet, save it for after this one — chart descriptions live and die on the percent / percentage points distinction.

The Pattern

Reading formulas aloud. Mathematical symbols all have English names, and many of them are short and easy to learn.

• = is equals or is. (A equals pi r squared. A is pi r squared.)
• + is plus or and. (Two plus three. Two and three.)
• − is minus or subtract. (Ten minus four.)
• × is times or multiplied by. (Three times five. Three multiplied by five.)
• ÷ is divided by or over. (Twelve divided by four. Twelve over four.)
• r² is r squared. r³ is r cubed. r⁴ is r to the fourth or r to the power of four.
• √ is the square root of. ∛ is the cube root of.
• π is pi, said like the dessert.
• ∞ is infinity.
• ( ) are parentheses (US) or brackets (UK). Open and close them aloud when needed: "open parenthesis ... close parenthesis."
• x / y can be read as x over y in formulas or x divided by y.
• |x| is the absolute value of x.

Describing charts. A handful of verbs do most of the work.

• Things go up: rise, climb, grow, increase, go up, jump, surge, soar.
• Things go down: fall, drop, decline, decrease, go down, plunge, sink.
• Things stay flat: remain stable, plateau, hold steady, stay the same, level off.
• Things wobble: fluctuate, bounce around, go up and down.
• Things peak: reach a peak, hit a high of, top out at.
• Things bottom out: hit a low of, bottom out at.

Then add the size and the speed: sharp, steep, gradual, slight, modest, steady, rapid, dramatic. "Sales rose sharply." "Profits declined gradually."

Unpacking word problems. Word problems are stories with hidden equations. The trick is to translate.

• of often means multiply: "twenty percent of fifty" = 0.20 × 50.
• per means divide or for every: "miles per gallon" = miles ÷ gallons.
• total means add.
• difference means subtract.
• ratio of A to B means A divided by B (or A : B depending on context).
• out of points to a denominator: "eighteen out of thirty" = 18/30.
• more than and less than often mean addition and subtraction in stories, but they can be tricky. "Six more than twice a number" means 2x + 6, not 6 + 2x reversed.

Wrong / Natural / Why

Common Situations

Reading a formula in class. A teacher writes E = mc² on the board and says, "E equals m c squared — energy equals mass times the speed of light squared." Notice how the formula is read symbol by symbol, and then the meaning is restated in plain words. Good speakers do both, because the symbol-only version sounds robotic, and the meaning-only version skips the math.

Describing a line chart. "The graph shows revenue from twenty twenty to twenty twenty-four. Revenue rose steadily from about two million to four million, peaking in twenty twenty-three at just over four point two. Then it dipped slightly to four million by the end of the period." Notice the verbs (rose, peaking, dipped) and the precision words (steadily, just over, slightly). They build a picture without needing exact numbers.

Comparing two charts. "While sales grew sharply in the first half, marketing spend stayed flat, which meant the profit margin widened. By contrast, in the second half, marketing climbed but sales leveled off." Comparison words like while, by contrast, meanwhile, and on the other hand help the listener track two trends at once.

Walking through a word problem. A tutor explains: "A train leaves a station at sixty miles per hour and another train leaves the same station two hours later at eighty. Let's call the time the second train travels t. We know the first train has a head start of two hours, so its distance is sixty times t plus two. The second train's distance is eighty t. For them to meet, those distances are equal." This is the explain a calculation out loud skill applied to algebra.

Reading a pie chart. "Roughly half of the budget goes to salaries, about a quarter to rent, and the remaining quarter is split between marketing and supplies." Pie charts almost always use fractions and percentages together. Mixing in How to Say Decimals, Fractions, and Ratios Without Freezing makes this kind of description sound natural.

Describing a bar chart with categories. "Among the four product lines, A had the highest sales at just under ten million, followed by B at about seven, then C at five, and finally D at just over two." Words like followed by, then, finally, and the lowest turn a bar chart into a ranked list.

Common Mistakes

• Reading superscripts as ordinary digits: r two for r². The standard reading is r squared / r cubed / r to the fourth.
• Using of for changes in chart descriptions: rose of ten percent. The correct preposition is by.
• Treating sales, data, and statistics as singular. In business and academic English, sales is plural ("sales are up"), and data is increasingly accepted as either singular or plural but usually plural in formal writing ("the data show").
• Forgetting adverbs after action verbs. Saying sales rose sharp instead of sales rose sharply.
• Calling parentheses brackets in US contexts (or vice versa). Both terms exist, but they are not interchangeable across regions.
• Reading π as pie instead of pi. They are pronounced the same in English, but written separately. Just say "pi."
• Confusing more than in word problems. "Six more than twice a number" is 2x + 6; "twice as many as six" is 2 × 6.
• Saying the chart says instead of the chart shows. Charts show, display, illustrate, or indicate — they do not say.
• Skipping units in the answer. "The result is 30" is bare; "the result is 30 percent" or "30 dollars" or "30 square meters" is complete.

Mini Practice

Read each item aloud, naming all symbols and reading the math as a sentence.

1. A = πr² (the area of a circle).
2. The line graph rose ___ 20% in Q1 and then dropped ___ 10% in Q2. (Fill in the prepositions.)
3. Twenty percent ___ fifty ___ ten. (Fill in of and the equals word.)
4. (3 + 4)² = 49 (read it aloud).
5. Describe in one sentence: a bar chart where Product A sold 80 units, B sold 60, C sold 40, and D sold 20.

Summary

Mathematical English has three layers: symbols (read aloud as full words like squared, over, pi), chart verbs (rose, fell, plateaued, with adverbs like sharply or gradually), and word-problem translation (of means multiply, per means divide, out of means a fraction). When you fluently move between symbols, charts, and stories, quantitative English stops being a foreign language inside a foreign language. Practice reading one formula and describing one chart out loud every day, and within weeks, your data presentations will sound like English, not a translation of math.

Want to practice numbers, quantifiers, and units in real test sentences? Start practicing on ExamRift.