The repetition of “sports” sounds really bad to a native speaker. Sports are a big part of my life and I think more people should take up sports and incorporate sports into their daily life. Sports are a great way to meet other people, so I do sports as much as possible. Look at this dialogue ask yourself what is wrong with it:Ĭandidate: Yes, I do sports. However, for English learners it is necessary to insert them into speech on purpose. Native English speakers use synonyms all the time without thinking. This is a very common question type and students should be prepared to follow the summary while listening to the passage. Synonyms can be particularly important when doing summary completion. If the question is looking a population, you might hear “number of people who live there”. When looking at questions, you ought to be thinking of words with similar meanings just in case the word or phrase in the question doesn’t appear exactly in the listening passage. You should make a mental note to search the text for references to crime and punishment, or even to police – that can help you find the part of the text you should focus on.īeing able to do this means you can save a lot of time, and that is the key to success in IELTS reading. However, “criminals” may be referred to as “thieves,” “prisoners,” “murderers,” “law-breakers,” or some other word or phrase. When you scan the text for information relating to criminals, you may or may not find the actual word used. Perhaps there is a question about “criminals,” for example.
When looking at questions in the IELTS Reading Exam, you need to pick out key words. To do this, you need to be good with synonyms. If the IELTS Reading Exam was two hours long, it would be easy! However, at just 60 minutes it is a very difficult exam to pass, and so it is important to be able to read quickly. This is because the time limit is so short. Arguably the most important IELTS reading skills are skimming and scanning. The IELTS Reading Exam requires a number of important skills to get a high band score. These area synonyms and avoid the writing from sounding boring. You may find that when an article talks about an object like a book, they replace book with “text,” “tome,” or even “read” (used as a noun). When reading a text that is written in English, you may notice that some words are used to avoid repetition. If you want to double-check, you can consult a thesaurus. Dictionaries may point out synonyms, or else you may notice similarities in meaning. However, it is important to build an extensive and varied vocabulary, and to do this you should make use of a dictionary. It wouldn’t be very useful for your English skill to memorize lists of synonyms and recite them aloud. You don’t need to specifically study synonyms. Note that the words above are not exactly the same in meaning, but very close. These add colour to the language and reduce the need for repetition. Because English is a language with such a huge vocabulary ( some people say nearly a million!) there are naturally many synonyms.
What are Synonyms?Ī synonym is a word that has the same or nearly the same meaning as another word.
In today’s lesson, we examine the importance of synonyms in IELTS. Every IELTS student knows that vocabulary is important when attempting to get a high band score, but do they really understand how useful it is to know lots of synonyms? In fact, learning synonyms is a great way to improve all areas of your IELTS skill.