English for IELTS, Business & Advanced
Why is a dialect spoken by just 2% of the UK population considered to be standard British English? Most people outside the UK seem to think that so-called British English is what we speak in the British Isles. It’s not even close. It is, however, adored by those bloggers who love to compare US and ‘British English’.
So why does a minor dialect from a small region of the UK get so much attention?
Continue ReadingUnlike most other languages, English has no single organisation to manage the grammar rules. Into this gaping hole stepped the busybodies to make things up.
Britain, which spawned the English language, has regulatory bodies for all the other languages spoken across those green and pleasant islands: Gaelic, Scots, Welsh. And, erm, Cornish? Cornish is a Celtic language from the south-west of England that became extinct over two hundred years ago.
We, therefore, have authorities to look after dead languages but no one to look after the most widely spoken language in the world. This means we’ve ended up with a number of fake rules invented by interfering busybodies and maintained by their virtual descendants.
Continue ReadingWe use prepositions to show a relationship or a connection between nouns and pronouns. Prepositions are therefore typically followed by a noun phrase or pronoun, for example, I go to the shop. The pronoun I is connected to the noun shop by the preposition to.
Since there are no real rules for English prepositions, it’s easier to learn how to use prepositions for IELTS by using the following context guidelines.
Modal Verbs are auxiliary or helping verbs that support the main verb and are used to express concepts such as possibility, ability, deduction, habits and hypothetical, imaginary and conditional situations. They are also used to express politeness.
You will need to be able to use and understand modal verbs effectively for the IELTS exam. They are, however, a fairly extensive grammatical topic but this post will provide you with the basics needed to pass the IELTS exam.
Continue ReadingQuestion tags are very common and mainly used in spoken English. They turn a statement into a question. They are generally used to confirm something you believe to be true or to encourage a reply from the person you’re speaking to.
You should look to use question tags in your IELTS speaking exams as they are part of everyday English.
Continue ReadingRelative clauses are used to tell us more about the people and things or to make it clear who or what we are talking or writing about. So instead of saying, I live in London. I like living in London, we can say I live in London which I like.
A clause is merely a sentence, meaning that it is a group of words that contains a verb. Relative clauses are the type of grammar structures you need to be using in your IELTS writing and speaking exams.
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