If there is a compliment, there must be criticism. In IELTS Writing, the topic is usually about a “problem”, so it feels like the article must always have something “bad” or “harmful”. Therefore, it is extremely useful to know many harmful expressions in IELTS. Similar to the previous article, we should not say sentences like:
A is bad
>>>> Review the previous lesson: How to describe a good thesis
Instead, we need to focus on how specific the “bad” is. You can follow one of the following methods:
1) Use correct adjectives
There are many adjectives with negative meanings, and negative sentences like this are a good opportunity to “pull” out these adjectives. For example, instead of saying:
Overeating is bad.
Say:
Overeating is detrimental/unhealthy.
For each noun that belongs to different topics, you have very different adjectives to attach to it. For example, if something is bad, it could be illegal, harmful, wasting time, etc. If a food is bad, it could be bad, unhealthy, expensive, … Think about what words you will use in your language to describe this, and find the English word that best fits your language word you know.
2) A waste of something
A very common meaning of “bad” is “wasting something”. For example:
Watching TV is bad => watching TV is a waste of time
Shopping for clothes is bad => shopping for clothes is a waste of money.
Note: you can change “is a waste of …” to the verb “waste”
Watching TV is a waste of time => Watching TV wastes a lot of time
Shopping for clothes is a waste of money => Shopping for clothes wastes a lot of money
3) A reduction of something of B
This is a fairly colorful way to interpret the subject’s “bad” in more detail. Take for example: watching lots of TV harmful to children. Think about what “watching TV” reduces to “children”.
There are many things, right? The “watching TV” can reduce first is the dynamism, moreover is the time for family, interaction with parents.
Watching TV is bad for children
=> Watching TV reduces children’s activity level.
=> Watching TV shortens the time children spend with their parents.
4) A raises something “bad” in B.
Similarly, we can rewrite in the opposite way that A raises an already “bad” quality in B.
For children, in contrast to the dynamic, it is definitely … tedious, cake dirt, lazy. Contrary to the time spent with parents, it is likely that children will be exposed to violence that is not suitable for their age.
Watching TV reduces children’s activity level => Watching TV encourages children’s laziness.
Watching TV shortens the time children spend with their parents => Watching TV means children are spending more time watching violent content.
Here are 4 easy to use methods to help you better describe the “bad” quality. You don’t have to stick to one method and use it for the whole article. Mixing all 4 ways together will give you a lively essay and show more language skills!
to a buffet breakfast as young psychologist Sebastian Bailey enters the room to begin the morning’s framing session. But this is no ordinary training session. He’s not here to sharpen their finance or management skills. He’s here to exercise their brains.
and reach your destination without error. It’s certainly nice to have the Global Positioning System (GPS) to direct you to within a few yards of your goal. Yet if the satellite service’s digital maps become even slightly outdated, you can become lost. Then you have to rely on the ancient human skill of navigating in three-dimensional space. Luckily, your biological finder has an important advantage over GPS: it does not go awry if only one part of the guidance system goes wrong, because it works in various ways. You can ask questions of people on the sidewalk. Or follow a street that looks familiar. Or rely on a navigational rubric: “If I keep the East River on my left, I will eventually cross 34th Street.” The human positioning system is flexible and capable of learning. Anyone who knows the way from point A to point B—and from A to C—can probably figure out how to get from B to c, too.
C. If you ask passersby for help, most likely you will receive information in many different forms. A person who orients herself by a prominent landmark would gesture southward: “Look down there. See the tall, broad MetLife Building? Head for that “the station is right below it.” Neurologists call this navigational approach “guidance,” meaning that a landmark visible from a distance serves as the marker for one’s destination.
E. Whether it is trying to get back to the anthill or the train station, any animal using path integration must keep track of its own movements so it knows, while returning, which segments it has already completed. As you move, your brain gathers data from your environment—sights, sounds, smells, lighting, muscle contractions, a sense of time passing—to determine which way your body has gone. The church spire, the sizzling sausages on that vendor’s grill, the open courtyard, and the train station—all represent snapshots of memorable junctures during your journey.
will use guidance, path integration and route following in various combinations. But how exactly do these constructs deliver concrete directions? Do we humans have, as an image of the real world, a kind of road map in our heads—with symbols for cities, train stations and churches; thick lines for highways; narrow lines for local streets? Neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists do call the portion of our memory that controls navigation a “cognitive map.” The map metaphor is obviously seductive: maps are the easiest way to present geographic information for convenient visual inspection. In many cultures, maps were developed before writing, and today they are used in almost every society. It is even possible that maps derive from a universal way in which our spatial-memory networks are wired.
A. One of the world’s most famous yet least visited archaeological sites, Easter Island is a small, hilly, now treeless island of volcanic origin. Located in the Pacific Ocean at 27 degrees south of the equator and some 2200 miles (3600 kilometers) off the coast of Chile, it is considered to be the world’s most remote inhabited island. The island is, technically speaking, a single massive volcano rising over ten thousand feet from the Pacific Ocean floor. The island received its most wellknown current name, Easter Island, from the Dutch sea captain Jacob Roggeveen who became the first European to visit Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722.
settled by advanced societies of Indians from the coast of South America. Extensive archaeological, ethnographic and linguistic research has conclusively shown this hypothesis to be inaccurate. It is now recognized that the original inhabitants of Easter Island are of Polynesian stock (DNA extracts from skeletons have confirmed this, that they most probably came from the Marquesas or Society islands, and that they arrived as early as 318 AD (carbon dating of reeds from a grave confirms this). At the time of their arrival, much of the island was forested, was teeming with land birds, and was perhaps the most productive breeding site for seabirds in the Polynesia region. Because of the plentiful bird, fish and plant ‘ food sources, the human population grew and gave rise to a rich religious and artistic culture.
massive stone platforms called ahu. There are some 250 of these ahu platforms spaced approximately one half mile apart and creating an almost unbroken line around the perimeter of the island. Another 600 moai statues, in various stages of completion, are scattered around the island, either in quarries or along ancient roads between the quarries and the coastal areas where the statues were most often erected. Nearly all the moai are carved from the tough stone of the Rano Raraku volcano. The average statue is 14 feet and 6 inches tall and weighs 14 tons. Some moai were as large as 33 feet and weighed more than 80 tons. Depending upon the size of the statues, it has been estimated that between 50 and 150 people were needed to drag them across the countryside on sleds and rollers made from the island’s trees.
return, the spectre of floods is returning too. Just weeks ago, the river Rhone in south-east France burst its banks, driving 15,000 people from their homes, and worse could be on the way. Traditionally, river engineers have gone for Plan A: get rid of the water fast, draining it off the land and down to the sea in tall-sided rivers re-engineered as highperformance drains. But however big they dig city drains, however wide and straight they make the rivers, and however high they build the banks, the floods keep coming back to taunt them, from the Mississippi to the Danube. And when the floods come, they seem to be worse than ever.
may help cities prepare, but it won’t stop the floods. To do that, say hydrologists, you need a new approach to engineering not just Agency – country €1 billion – puts it like this: “The focus is now on working with the forces of nature. Towering concrete walls are out, and new wetlands are in.” To help keep London’s upstream and reflooding 10 square k outside Oxford. Nearer to London it has spent Åí100 million creating new wetlands and a relief channel across 16 kilometres.
restorations to date. Engineers are regenerating flood plains along 60 kilometres of the river Drava as it exits the Alps. They are also widening the river bed and channelling it back into abandoned meanders, oxbow lakes and backwaters overhung with willows. The engineers calculate that the restored flood plain can now store up to 10 million cubic metres of flood waters and slow storm surges coming out of the Alps by more than an hour, protecting towns as far downstream as Slovenia and Croatia.
is a matter of survival, have gone furthest. A nation built largely on drained marshes and seabed had the fright of its life in 1993 when the Rhine almost overwhelmed it. The same happened again in 1995, when a quarter of a million people were evacuated from the Netherlands. But a new breed of “soft engineers” wants our cities to become porous, and Berlin is theft governed by tough new rules to prevent its drains becoming overloaded after heavy rains. Harald Kraft, an architect working in the city, says: “We now see rainwater as giant Potsdamer Platz, a huge new commercial redevelopment by DaimlerChrysler in the heart of the city.
(10 cm) or as high as 28 inches (71 cm). The tulip’s large flowers usually bloom on scapes or sub-scapose stems that lack bracts. Most tulips produce only one flower per stem, but a few species bear multiple flowers on their scapes (e.g. Tulipa turkestanica). The showy, generally cup or star-shaped tulip flower has three petals and three sepals, which are often termed tepals because they are nearly identical. These six tepals are often marked on the interior surface near the bases with darker colorings. Tulip flowers come in a wide variety of colors, except pure blue (several tulips with “blue” in the name have a faint violet hue)
question that springs to mind after reading Tulip mania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused by British journalist Mike Dash. In recent years, as investors have intentionally forgotten everything they learned in Investing 101 in order to load up on unproved, unprofitable dotcom issues, tulip mania has been invoked frequently. In this concise, artfully written account, Dash tells the real history behind the buzzword and in doing so, offers a cautionary tale for our times.
intense and more concentrated than those of ordinary plants.” Despite the outlandish prices commanded by rare bulbs, ordinary tulips were sold by the pound. Around 1630, however, a new type of tulip fancier appeared, lured by tales of fat profits. These “florists,” or professional tulip traders, sought out flower lovers and speculators alike. But if the supply of tulip buyers grew quickly, the supply of bulbs did not. The tulip was a conspirator in the supply squeeze: It takes seven years to grow one from seed. And while bulbs can produce two or three clones, or “offsets,” annually, the mother bulb only lasts a few years.
A. Our mother may have told you the secret to getting what you ask for was to say please. The reality is rather more surprising. Adam Dudding talks to a psychologist who has made a life’s work from the science of persuasion. Some scientists peer at things through highpowered microscopes. Others goad rats through mazes, or mix bubbling fluids in glass beakers. Robert Cialdini, for his part, does curious things with towels, and believes that by doing so he is discovering important insights into how society works.
things I didn’t want and give to causes I hadn’t heard of,” says Cialdini on the phone from London, where he is plugging his latest book.
scientist David Strohmetz, who wanted to see how restaurant patrons would respond to a ridiculously small favour from their food server, in the form of an after-dinner chocolate for each diner. The secret, it seems, is in how you give the chocolate. When the chocolates arrived in a heap with the bill, tips went up a miserly 3% compared to when no chocolate was given. But when the chocolates were dropped individually in front of each diner, tips went up 14%. The scientific breakthrough, though, came when the waitress gave each diner one chocolate, headed away from the table then doubled back to give them one more each, as if such generosity had only just occurred to her. Tips went up 23%. This is “reciprocity” in action: we want to return favours done to US, often without bothering to calculate the relative value of what is being received and given.
you set out to influence them. “You’d be surprised how many people fail to do that,” says Cialdini. “They feel it’s impolite to talk about then expertise.” In one study, therapists whose patients wouldn’t do then exercises were advised to display then qualification certificates prominently. They did, and experienced an immediate leap in patient compliance.
needed to be present before the revolution could happen. The chief conditions are to be found in history textbooks. For industry to ‘take off’, there needed to be the technology and power to drive factories, large urban populations to provide cheap labour easy transport to move goods around, an affluent middle-class willing to buy mass-produced objects, a market-driven economy, and a political system that allowed this to happen. While this was the case for England, other nations, such as Japan, Holland and France also met some of these criteria. All these factors must have been necessary but not sufficient to cause the revolution. Holland had everything except coal, while China also had many of these factors.
165D and 1740, the population was static. But then there was a burst in population. The infant mortality rate halved in the space of 20 years, and this happened in both rural areas and cities, and across all classes. Four possible causes have been suggested. There could have been a sudden change in the viruses and bacteria present at that time, but this is unlikely. Was there a revolution in medical science? But this was a century before Lister introduced antiseptic surgery. Was there a change in environmental conditions? There were improvements in agriculture that wiped out malaria, but these were small gains. Sanitation did not become widespread until the 19th century. The only option left was food. But the height and weight statistics show a decline. So the food got worse. Efforts to explain this sudden reduction in child deaths appeared to draw a blank.
When the Industrial Revolution started, it was economically efficient to have people crowded together forming towns and cities. But with crowded living conditions comes disease, particularly from human waste. Some research in the historical records revealed that there was a change in the incidence of waterborne disease at that time, the English were protected by the strong antibacterial agent in hops, which were added to make beer last. But in the late 17th century a tax was introduced on malt. The poor turned to water and gin, and in the 1720s the mortality rate began to rise again.
the doomsday scenario painted by many ecologists, and they may well be right. The trouble is we don’t know for sure because we don’t have a clear picture of how life changes between extinction events or what has happened in previous episodes. We don’t even know how many species are alive today, let alone the rate at which they are becoming extinct. A new project aims to fill some of the gaps. The Paleobiology Database aspires to be an online repository of information about every fossil ever dug up. It is a huge undertaking that has been described as biodiversity’s equivalent of the Human Genome Project. Its organizers hope that by recording the history of biodiversity they will gain an insight into how environmental changes have shaped life on Earth in the past and how they might do so in the future. The database may even indicate whether life can rebound no matter what we throw at it, or whether a human induced extinction could be without parallel, changing the rules that have applied throughout the rest of the planet’s history.
looking for global patterns that show relative changes in biodiversity. “The fossil record is the best tool we have for understanding how diversity and extinction work in normal times,” says John Alroy from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara. “Having a background extinction estimate gives US a benchmark for understanding the mass extinction that’s currently under way. It allows us to say just how bad it is in relative terms.”
points out that statistical wrangling has been known to create mass extinctions where none occurred. It is easy to misinterpret data. For example, changes in sea level or inconsistent sampling methods can mimic major changes in biodiversity. Indeed, a recent and thorough examination of the literature on marine bivalve fossils has convinced David Jablonsky from the University of Chicago and his colleagues that their diversity has increased steadily over the past 5 million years.
A. Science plays an increasingly significant role in people’s lives, making the faithful communication of scientific developments more important than ever. Yet such communication is fraught with challenges that can easily distort discussions, leading to unnecessary confusion and misunderstandings.
F. Even the word “theory” can be a problem. Unlike most people, who use the word to describe a passing conjecture that they often regard as suspect, physicists have very specific ideas in mind when they talk about theories. For physicists, theories entail a definite physical framework embodied in a set of fundamental assumptions about the world that lead to a specific set of equations and predictions — ones that are borne out by successful predictions. Theories aren’t necessarily shown to be correct or complete immediately. Even Einstein took the better part of a decade to develop the correct version of his theory of general relativity. But eventually both the ideas and the measurements settle down and theories are either proven correct, abandoned or absorbed into other, more encompassing theories.
clarify many scientific discussions. For several months, Harvard was tortured months. Harvard was tortured by empty debates over the relative intrinsic scientific abilities of men and women. One of the more amusing aspects of the discussion was that those who believed in the differences and those who didn’t used the same evidence about gender-specific special ability. How could that be? The answer is that the data shows no substantial effects. Social factors might account for these tiny differences, which in any case have an unclear connection to scientific ability. Not much of a headline when phrased that way, is it? Each type of science has its own source of complexity and potential for miscommunication. Yet there are steps we can take to improve public understanding in all cases. The first would be to inculcate greater understanding and acceptance of indirect scientific evidence. The information from an unmanned space mission is no less legitimate than the information from one in which people are on board.