40% of people living with HIV have risk to develop tuberculosis.
Yes. ‘Risk’ can be a ‘risky’ word in English!
We can assume that if there’s a risk, then there is some kind of ‘bad thing’ causing the risk, for example ‘developing tuberculosis’. Continue reading
Recently in class Chomsky’s name came up in discussion as the most widely cited author, but not many students knew his name or why he is so well-known.
The following video outlines Chomsky’s ground-breaking theory of language.
Before you watch the video, discuss with a friend the following questions.
Watch the video and then attempt the text reconstruction activity at the bottom of the page.
It is important to test products on animals before releasing them commercially to markets.
The problem here is that there are two kinds of market – physical and virtual – and in this example, markets (plural) suggests more than one physical market, while releasing them commercially suggests more than one virtual market. Let’s take a look at some examples.
These are the places you go early in the morning to buy cheap vegetables. Often this kind of market is outdoor:
If it’s an indoor market then it’s usually inside a large hall:
The featured image for this post shows people buying and selling things on the virtual market. They’re not buying anything inside that building, rather they are investing in things that are located elsewhere so that they can hopefully receive some of the profits from the sale of those things.
A particular virtual market or set of virtual markets may be mentioned explicitly:
Sometimes more than one virtual market is implied:
And sometimes a specific virtual market is implied but not mentioned explicitly:
If the name of a virtual market is not given, certain phrases can suggest that you’re talking about a virtual rather than a physical market.
If it’s on the market (one or more virtual markets), it’s not at the market (a single physical market).
Our opening example implies a set of virtual markets that are not explicitly mentioned, and so we need:
Every people can access their own social media account with the touch of a finger.
This is partly forgivable. We know that millions of people (= millions of fingers) use social media, and this writer is making a statement that applies to all of these people. However, there is some faulty grammar: Continue reading
Social media may grow up rapidly in the future.
This is a kind of understandable error. Students have seen or heard ‘grow up’ and they assume that absolutely anything can ‘grow up’.
However, only children grow up: Continue reading
Online news can spread out quickly because most people these days have smartphones.
OK so first of all if something spreads, it’s difficult to ‘unspread’ it: Continue reading
News from online media is easy to be found.
With easy and difficult you need active verbs:
..and with a different verb:
So, that was easy to fix! (NOT ‘to be fixed’!)
In recent years, social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter have become widely discussed in society.
Let’s analyse this and see if it ticks the right boxes in terms of the desirable features of an opening sentence in IELTS Task 2 writing. Continue reading
Technology is very useful for people’s life.
This common error made by Indonesian students is easy to avoid if we appreciate that the last three words are actually redundant. Let me explain… Continue reading
Technology makes people rely themselves on instruments.
In this sentence, themselves is described by grammarians as a ‘reflexive pronoun’. Reflexive pronouns are used when the object of a sentence is the same as the subject. For example: Continue reading
