This is the IELTS Energy Podcast, Episode 1512.
Take a moment to boost IELTS vocabulary scores.
Welcome to the IELTS Energy Podcast from All Ears English. downloaded more than 35 million times with examiner-trained IELTS whiz Aubrey Carter. and Lindsay McMahon, the English adventurer.
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To score high on IELTS, go into the exam with a handful of idioms and be ready to tweak your answer to make them work.
Today, get five idioms with the word moment to answer common IELTS speaking questions.
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Hello, Lindsay. How are you? Good, Aubrey.
I'm doing great. Happy to be on the microphone here.
What are we talking about today? Yeah, we got a great question on Spotify.
The question was, I need some idioms for IELTS speaking.
I know you are correct. Everyone out there, you must use idiomatic language on IELTS Speaking.
So it's interesting. We're going to use some very flexible.
We're going to teach some flexible idioms today. that all have the word moment that you can use all over the speaking exam.
I'm curious, Lindsay, are you good at taking a moment before you speak or do you sometimes speak without thinking?
Oh, I speak without thinking for sure. Yeah, I'm not very good at just composing myself and considering every word.
I try to. But yeah, there are moments when I just speak and then I say, oh, that was probably not the right thing to say.
What about you? I do that too, as well, right?
Sometimes I'm like, I should have taken just a moment to think about what I wanted to say, collect my thoughts, right?
And this is tricky because on IELTS speaking, you don't always have that moment to think, right?
We recommend using filler phrases, really practicing because you can't just pause. and be silent while you think of what you want to say.
But the idioms we're going to use today are perfect for all over the speaking exam.
Today, we're going to teach the vocabulary.
And then in part two of this series, so in the next episode.
We're going to use these idioms in part one and part two questions.
So definitely hit follow so that you don't miss that episode.
Yes, I love that. Hit the follow button now, guys, so that IELTS Energy shows up in your listening queue twice a week.
And again, you don't miss any series, parts of series.
Okay. So we do have some great, yeah, great phrases to kind of articulate this something happening right away.
Exactly. Right. So our first idiom is a light bulb moment.
So this is when you have a realization or an idea.
For example, if you're asked about your job or your education, which is very likely to happen on part one, you're guaranteed to either be asked about work or what you're studying, or about your home or hometown.
So you wanna practice answering about all those questions.
You could say something like, I was fortunate enough to complete an internship in accounting.
It was a light bulb moment that made me realize I didn't love it and needed to switch over to something else.
So if you think about the ways you could say that instead that aren't idiomatic, if you're saying, I realized this.
I had a realization that's band six, right?
If you're able to use idioms, it really boosts your vocabulary score.
So are we talking about the difference here between a band six and like a band eight or potentially nine, Aubrey?
That's a really good question, right? So whether you score band seven, band eight, band nine depends on how much high scoring vocabulary you're using.
So if you just use one or two idioms, you can score a band seven for vocabulary.
If you also do not have repetition, you're not making a lot of mistakes. even just a couple of idioms, right?
You are required to use idiomatic language to score seven or higher.
That can be phrasal verbs, idioms. slang, right?
This is all idiomatic language that you can't tell from the actual words what it means.
Yeah, so if we wanna add more, if it's about volume, right, of these idiomatic phrases, It's good to learn ones like the ones we're learning today that serve multiple types of questions. right?
Some idioms are a little too narrow, right?
A little too specific where you would have to be asked a very specific question to be able to use it.
Today's idioms are not like that. They're very flexible, right?
Anytime, almost any question, you could sneak in how you had an idea about something. how you realized something you'd say it was a real light bulb moment.
Mm-hmm. 100%. I love that. All right. So next one then, Aubrey, this one applies to things that happen at the last minute.
Exactly. It's spur of the moment. So as you can see, this also would be extremely flexible.
If you're asked about weekend plans, vacations... anything that happened last minute, or maybe you changed your mind last minute, you can say it happened at the spur of the moment.
Yeah, so for example, if someone asks me, if the examiner asks me about a recent vacation, I could say I actually wasn't planning any trips this summer.
However, when a friend invited me to join her on a cruise in the Bahamas, I made a spur of the moment decision to go.
Wow. Yes, exactly. Right. So it means the same as like last minute.
Right. I made a last minute decision to go. which is good as well, but that's probably band six.
We hear students use it a lot. It's more common.
This idiom. right, spur of the moment, we don't hear as often.
So I would say this is for sure band eight, band nine.
If you can use some of these less common expressions. that's where you can get those higher vocab scores.
Yeah, it's this concept, do the opposite of what everyone else is doing to be successful.
Exactly, right? Those more common words. are what is going to keep that vocab score low.
So these idioms are more rare. The examiner will absolutely know them.
None of them are that extremely rare, but the students don't use them a ton.
So they will be high scoring. Okay. What about heat of the moment?
That's our third one. So this means to feel temporarily emotional, maybe angry. excited or caught up in something.
And then usually doing something without stopping to think.
We'll say we did something in the heat of the moment. which means I was being affected by my emotions when I did it.
Is it a common question that examiners might ask about an argument with a friend, would you say?
Definitely, yeah, on part two. You might be asked to describe an argument with a friend or on part one, you might be asked if you argue often with friends.
How would you respond to a question like that, Lindsay?
Yeah. You could say, in the heat of the moment, I said some things I ended up regretting.
Luckily, we were able to work it out. So obviously I would have had more details building up to that.
Exactly, right? This is a couple of sentences you could have added with this idiom.
For any of these, if it's a part two asking you to describe an argument, you'd be speaking for a full two minutes.
You definitely want to tell a story about that argument.
But you definitely, these are idioms that you could find a way to work them in.
It's not a given. This is going to take some practice.
You'll want to practice a lot of sample answers using these idioms so that they're in your active vocabulary.
You're ready to add them to any answer. Yeah, that's an important point, Aubrey.
It's not enough just to listen to the podcast, know these idioms, but not actually practice putting them into your stories and your examples.
That is a really key piece of your preparation.
If you do that on test day, you'll be thinking of this list of idioms you have in a notebook somewhere and you won't be able to recall.
Call them in your answers. You have to do this very proactively.
Practice using them in practice answers.
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Okay, Aubrey, we are back from break. So number four, caught up in the moment.
What does this mean? Yes, it means to be so excited about something that you have trouble thinking about any else will say and often we'll use it as an excuse to be like oh I was just really caught up in the moment if you're late for something forget about something that's the excuse we'll sometimes times give.
Yes, exactly right. So for example, if the examiner asks you about a favorite film or maybe a time that you felt emotional, got emotional.
You might say it was such a heartwarming film that I actually started sobbing in the middle of the theater.
I guess I really got caught up in the moment.
Yeah, and so this is, you just felt emotional, right?
Often we'll get caught up in the emotions of a film or a conversation.
And then it's often about forgetting about everything else going on around us.
So maybe someone who's not usually willing to cry in public... will get caught up in the emotions during a film, get caught up in the moment and start sobbing in a theater.
I do this. Do you do this, Lindsay? Yeah.
I was going to ask you, are you a movie crier?
Yeah. Whether I'm in a theater or at home.
Absolutely. What about weddings? Do you cry at weddings?
I don't know that I have ever cried at a wedding.
Maybe someday. I think the weddings I have gone to were pretty informal, just happy occasions and But movies like Million Dollar Baby is a good example.
I don't know if you remember that one with Hilary Swank.
Of course I remember that. Loud, ugly cry.
A lot of crying. Yeah, ugly cry. Michelle and I had a conversation on the podcast about this years ago.
Have you ever seen the movie? I think it's Into the Wild.
Oh, yes. The story of Chris McCandless, the guy that went to Alaska, lived in a bus, ended up dying because he ate a potato root or something.
Both Michelle and I, again, that's another example of sobbing.
It just hit me so hard in the heat of the moment.
Yes, right, exactly. That's another, like when I watched that film, same, I got caught up in the moment, the emotion of what happened to him.
I think I cried for sure. I think it was like.
The music that had Eddie Vedder in there.
And it was like, oh, my God, this is so sad that this happened to this.
It's amazing how movies can play on our emotions like that.
So this is a great example. Amazing. Often whatever question you're asked on IELTS part one, As long as you answer the question directly, you can share anything related.
So if, for example, you weren't asked actually about a film, you're just asked about a time you felt emotional, You know, something like that.
You can share about a time a movie felt that way, that you felt that way while watching a film if something didn't happen in your real life.
Good to know. Good to know. I love it. All right.
Aubrey, we have one more to finish up our episode for today.
Yes, it is moment of truth. What does this mean, Lindsay?
A moment of truth. Yeah, this is an important time in life when you make a decision quickly, right?
Everything becomes very clear. Whatever you decide does have very important consequences.
It's like a hard right turn or a hard left turn.
Yes, those are both other good idioms that we say in the same kind of instance, right?
I took a hard right turn. But we're not talking about driving.
We're talking about in life, a decision we made that had a lot of consequences for our future.
Yeah. For example, Aubrey, what if the examiner asked you about a performance or maybe a time you were nervous?
Yeah, I might say after months of practice.
The moment of truth arrived and I stepped onto the stage for the final performance and So this is the sentence where you use that idiom.
Maybe you're talking about a music performance debate.
Any time where you had to perform publicly, this is perfect to say the moment of truth arrived when you actually had to perform.
All your practice paid off. Yes, great for a lot of different kinds of answers on IELTS.
And again, I think the key piece here for a takeaway for today's episode is make sure you're not just learning these phrases, you're practicing embedding them into your answers. and maybe altering your answers a little bit based on wanting to use the idiom rather than the other way around.
Exactly. I mean, what do you think about that approach? are only thinking about the easiest way to answer and what you're going to say.
It sometimes is difficult to fit idioms into your answers.
But if you know of a good one of today's idioms that you want to use, you can adjust your answer slightly to share information that will allow you to say it. about the moment of truth. whatever the examiner has asked you about, was there a moment of truth, this moment where everything paid off or a decision you made changed everything?
Yeah, so maybe that's a way to approach IELTS is knowing some broad idioms that we want to make sure we can use.
And then we have a lot of practice, a lot of test prep, having... tweaked our answers and guided them so that idiom actually makes sense.
That's easier than thinking... Okay, I have a blank to fill.
What idiom goes here? Oh gosh, now I'm stammering.
Because imagine, you will have learned a lot of idioms by the time you get there on test day when the speaking exam starts.
And if you're imagining it as like a bank of idioms and I have to think about which one fits in, you're going to end up hesitating, pausing, hurting your fluency scores.
So that's not what you want to do. Instead, I love this idea to have some idioms ready that are pretty flexible.
And then the way you answer will change so that you can use those idioms and have them make sense in your answer.
Yeah, it seems like the most nimble way to a nine.
Absolutely, exactly. It'll help both fluency scores and vocabulary scores.
So good. Aubrey, is there another episode our listeners should check out before we finish?
Yeah, if you missed it, scroll up. and check out 1508 Band 9 Exercise Vocabulary for IELTS. speaking.
That's another great episode where we shared very high scoring vocabulary if you are asked about exercise.
Yes, and the takeaway today, as we've already kind of said it, lead with the idioms you want.
And if you want to learn more about how to tweak answers with these idioms, come back for part two.
Make sure you're hitting follow on the show.
Absolutely. We'll share sample answers for part one and part two questions.
So we will see you there. All right. Sounds good.
See you next time. Bye. Thanks for listening to IELTS Energy.
Hit subscribe now and don't forget to find your estimated band score at allearsenglish.com slash my score.
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