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Idioms for IELTS

A piece of cake

This refers to a task task that can be accomplished very easily.

Anybody who thinks that the IELTS exam is a piece of cake is fooling themselves.

Remember that you won’t do yourself any favours if you simply throw these idioms into conversation during your IELTS interview. You must practice using them appropriately before the exam.

Google Adsense have kicked me out

I have been a little annoyed lately and quite distracted because I have been kicked off the Google Adsense affiliate program. It seems that I violated their terms and conditions and they have cut off all communication with me about this. It is very frustrating to not be able to speak with a human being about this and try to put my alleged mistakes and violations right but that is not the way that Google Adsense works.This post is not meant to be a rant about Google Adsense so I will stop talking about them now.

Unfortunately, I need to pay for the server for this site and my tiny earnings from Google Adsense provided the money for this. I have not been posting on my site because I have been trying to work out what to do next. I have been looking in to other affiliate programs and advertisers but I am not sure that I want to use them.

I won’t be posting until I have tidied up my site and all of my posts : I need to remove the Google Adsense code because there are ugly spaces everywhere now.

I am not sure how I am going to fund my server costs now but hopefully, I can move away from using affiliate advertising. I certainly don’t want to add those horrible adverts that pop up when you hover on an underlined word. They are really irritating.

The original reasons for having adverts on my site are explained here. Some site readers have made small donations to the site and this was really appreciated.

Hopefully, I will be back to posting next week. Fingers crossed.

Stephen

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More free listening practice for IELTS

Free listening practice for IELTS

It’s always great to discover a new source of fantastic listening practice material online. My students have been very enthusiatic about the range of listening practice materials, in video format, available on this site.
TED is a non-profit organisation devoted to ideas worth spreading in the areas of Technology, Entertainment and Design. The listening practice material is not specifically for IELTS students but sometimes IELTS students need to push the boundaries of their listening before they start to improve.

Here are six reasons why the TED talks are good IELTS listening practice material:

  1. There are hundreds of talks to listen to.
  2. You can search for talks subject – find something that interests you.
  3. You can search by length – some talks are only 3 minutes long.
  4. You can search by rating – eg funny, beautiful, inspiring.
  5. Some of the talks have subtitles in your language.
  6. This listening practice material is free to use

Visit the TED talks site right now to listen to some interesting and inspiring practice material.

Read about the position of adverbs here.

Formal and informal language for IELTS

Contractions in the IELTS exam

In the IELTS Academic writing module, avoid using contractions. Contractions set a more informal tone to a piece of writing. It is fine to use contractions in the speaking module – in fact, not using contractions when speaking will make your English sound halting and a little forced.

The number of job applications hasn’t increased over the last ten years.

The number of job applications has not increased over the last ten years.
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IELTS vocabulary : take effect

Something takes effect when it starts working.

The sleeping tablet didn’t take effect for at least an hour.

The new laws took effect at midnight.