Many students spend hours reading grammar books in order to improve their English. However, they are probably better off reading novels instead.
Most people are familiar with better off as the comparative form of well off (= wealthy). However, better off has other uses in IELTS speaking and writing (Task 2). Continue reading
Before they study at the university, students should spend a year traveling and working.
OK so there’s a difference between university and the university. The same difference applies to school and the school. Continue reading
Overall, the number of elder people (aged over 60) has increased significantly.
You are unlikely to find elder used to modify a noun like people. In this case older would be much more likely: Continue reading
When we travel to new places we get to meet people with different characters.
Literally this means that when we travel we meet people like Mickey Mouse! Continue reading
People can now shop for goods online. This makes online shopping more famous than shopping in physical stores.
Generally speaking the following meanings apply: Continue reading
The amount of time children spent watching TV remained stable, meanwhile the amount of time they spent using computers increased dramatically.
In this post we contrast while and meanwhile in terms of grammatical usage and their usefulness as contrast signals.
If we buy fresh food via online it will not be fresh by the time it arrives at our homes.
We say that we ‘go’ online, and so online feels like it’s a place, but it isn’t. It’s actually an adverb! Continue reading
In the metal and mining sector, companies are facing significant problems (Hopwood, 2018). For example, they face increasing production cost due to the rapid development of new mining technologies.
Like much basic vocabulary in the field of economics, cost is a difficult word! First of all this is one of those words that can be countable and uncountable, and secondly there are some usage peculiarities with each. Continue reading
Read about how to read a scientific paper, and pick up ten new vocabulary items along the way. Test your new vocab using the flashcards on this page! Continue reading
In fact, palm oil plantations cover huge hectares of land which often requires a significant amount of workforce to pick the heavy oil palm fruit.
Words like amount and number are used to communicate statistics, as in the amount of electricity, the number of deaths, etc. The same is true of workforce: Continue reading