Friday 19 October 2012

Geographical vocabulary for IELTS

IELTS exams seem to be particularly keen on geography. I suppose the idea is that we are all surrounded by geographical things - rivers, hills, cities - so the language is useful for everyone (as opposed to chemistry or philosophy, for example).


So all parts of the IELTS exams can contain questions where, to get the correct answer, you need to know some geographical terms.

How many of the words in the box do you know? 

 a hill
a range
boulders
a puddle
a hamlet
a town
a stream
a tributary
gravel
a pond
a mound
a lake/reservoir
a bush
pebbles
a city
a tree
a wood





Can you put the words into this table in order (from smallest to largest)? 

a)

river

b)


sea/ocean
c)

mountain

d)

rocks

e)


forest
f)
village



            Watch the video for the answers.



if you're a teacher you can get a copy of this worksheet here: https://docs.google.com/a/londonenglishclasses.com/file/d/0B1LCyaQkPPAhS0E2Wlp6dF9qVGs/edit

Sunday 14 October 2012

Vocabulary - shapes

In the IELTS listening you sometimes have to listen to a description of a diagram and either
a) label the diagram using words from the listening
b) match options in a box to parts of the diagram
c) match parts of the diagram to descriptions

The diagram could be a map or plan and later we will look at vocabulary useful for these. But sometimes the diagram is of an object,  often something like this:


To know which part of the object is being described it's important your vocabulary includes all of the basic shapes.  Here is a list of basic shapes - make sure you are familiar with both the nouns and their adjectives:







Thursday 11 October 2012

IELTS Writing Part 1 - Episode 3

So far we've looked at describing change in tables/graphs etc. This episode looks at when there ISN'T much change and the language we need to describe that:



There are some practice graphs for you at the end - just press pause if you need more time to read and think about everything before the answers come!