Monthly Archives: January 2011

If your expenses almost exceed your income, you have difficulty making ends meet. Some people find it impossible to live on their salary and get into debt. She earned so little that she couldn’t make ends meet and had to borrow money from her friends.

If you are all ears, you really want to hear what someone has got to say. It might be news or a story. It could even be instructions. He was all ears when the teacher told him that he was going to explain the secrets of IELTS success.

We say this when we want to start something. Perhaps we have a plan or we have been discussing a project for a while and now it is time to start work. It’s very similar in meaning to “let’s get down to business.” Okay everybody. I think we all understand why we are here at […]

We say this when we want to start something. Perhaps we have a plan or we have been discussing a project for a while and now it is time to start work. Okay everybody. I think we all understand why we are here at this meeting today and time is running out so let’s get […]

We can use this phrase when we can’t think of an appropriate answer to a question. It means that you are thinking about the answer but you don’t have it immediately. It is perfectly acceptable to say this in the IELTS speaking exam but you must come up with an answer after saying it. It […]

The most important thing you can do before the IELTS listening exam is do lots and lots of listening practice. This post suggests a great, free, online listening resource but there are others. The main thing is that you try to do a little listening every day. There’s no point waiting until the week before […]

Many IELTS students fall in to the trap of trying to understand every word in a reading text and their reading speed suffers. Many students seem to be trained to start reading at the first word of the reading text and continue word by word until the end is reached. These students set themselves the […]

There’s loads of free listening material on the Internet in the form of podcasts and your listening skills will only get better if you practise before your IELTS exam. The main thing is to get started and do some listening practice as soon as you can. Many IELTS students seem to think that they will […]