Example
about (adverb)
Neutral and natural; fine in a report.
About 40% of commuters travelled by bus in 2010.
Written by Fizza Butool Zaidi and Ali Zaidi
12 alternatives
Neutral and natural; fine in a report.
About 40% of commuters travelled by bus in 2010.
The same meaning as about, equally neutral.
The population of the town reached around 25,000 by 2000.
Neutral, slightly more conversational than approximately.
Roughly half of the budget went on salaries.
Slightly below the number.
Nearly a third of households owned two cars.
Don't swap blindly: Only if the real figure is below. 52% is not 'nearly half'; it is 'just over half'.
Slightly below the number; same as nearly.
Online sales almost doubled between 2019 and 2021.
Don't swap blindly: Same rule as nearly: the true figure must be lower.
Slightly above the number. Tells the reader the direction.
Just over a quarter of students lived at home.
Slightly below the number.
Just under 60% of the electricity came from gas.
Very near, usually just below.
Exports were worth close to $4 billion in 2015.
Formal; best with large round numbers.
Spending on roads was in the region of £2 billion a year.
Formal use before a number to mean about.
Some 40,000 people attended the festival in its first year.
Don't swap blindly: Only before a number, and mainly in formal writing.
When the chart shows estimates or projections.
An estimated 12 million people will live in the city by 2040.
Informal, after the number.
It takes twenty minutes or so to get to my office.
Paraphrasing
Band tip: the public IELTS Writing band descriptors for Lexical Resource describe Band 7 as using “less common lexical items” with “some awareness of style and collocation”. A synonym that changes your meaning or breaks a collocation works against you, so choose the word that fits the sentence, not the rarest one you know.
In context
Just over a quarter of students cycled to college, while roughly the same proportion travelled by bus. Walking was the most common choice at nearly 40%, and the remaining students, about one in ten, came by car.
About, around and roughly are the neutral swaps. Just over, just under and nearly add the direction of the rounding, which makes your description more precise.
It is common in British speech but informal. In Writing, use about or around on its own.
No. If the chart gives 25%, write 25% or 'a quarter'. Use approximately and its synonyms only when you are rounding.
In Task 1 they mean the same: slightly below the number. Nearly is a little more common in British English. Both are wrong if the real figure is above the number.
Practise
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