 In this video we're going to focus on vocabulary, specifically the difference between range and accuracy. Range and accuracy are the two things that the examiner will be thinking about when they're assessing your vocabulary on test day. And there's a huge misconception about what range actually means. So we're going to look at what the most popular IELTS blog and the most popular YouTube video have to say about this and why this is totally wrong. Why most students are getting this wrong and simple free methods that you can use to actually improve your vocabulary range to about seven, eight or even nine. We're also going to look at some of these books to help us. And I'm going to show you how you can use books like these and free resources online to improve your vocabulary effectively. So let's start off with the difference between range and accuracy. Accuracy refers to are the words spelled correctly is the meaning correct or the collocations correct. And we're not really going to focus on that today in this video. Because the biggest problem that we see at IELTS Advantage is students misunderstanding range and what range actually means. And this isn't actually the students fault. Let's look at whose fault this actually is. So if you go to the most popular IELTS blog, I'll not name it. But if you go to their vocabulary section, what they say is to get a high score, you must use a range of complex words. Most online resources, most teachers, not all teachers, but most of them are giving this kind of advice. All you have to do to get a band nine is learn lots of complex words, put those complex words into your essay, and you will magically get a high score. Well, that is not the case. And what this kind of advice does is it spawns stuff like this. So if you go on to YouTube and you look at the most popular YouTube video on vocabulary, this video has millions and millions of views. What they tell you is all you have to do is memorize words like this, mesmerize, dilemma, plethora, recapitulate, insert those into your essay, and you will magically get a high score. This is not what range means. And if your teacher is teaching you that, then they simply do not understand the official marking criteria that the examiners use. So what do we do instead? How can we actually improve our vocabulary to a band nine level? Well, what I've done here is I've divided the page into the four most common writing task two topics. Education and health are very, very common technology, the environment, these are not the only topics that you might get on test day for task two, but they are very, very common. So let's imagine that we get a question like this. Many students now learn online. What are the advantages and disadvantages? So if we just decided to say, you know, these days, online learning is mesmerized by students. And this poses a big dilemma because of a plethora of resources and to recapitulate, that is not going to work because it's not actually using the vocabulary that we normally use to discuss this topic. If we get this book, so this is just a random book on this topic that was on my bookshelf, and we go to the first page, we go to the introduction. What I've done here is I've underlined the topic specific words. So what are topic specific words? These are words that we need to use in order to discuss this topic teaching online, online education, internet, online learning, online courses, instructors, learners, teaching online, course on the web, mobile apps, e-learning, all of these words are very, very topic specific. But if we compare them with these words, they are actually quite simple. And a huge misunderstanding is that range means using lots of complex words. And the more complex words you use, the higher your score. And the more simple words you use, the lower your score. This is again a complete misunderstanding of the marking criteria. Because what the people at IELTS will do is in the writing test and the speaking test, they will ask you a range of different topics, a range of different topics. And what they will be testing is do you have enough of these topic specific words, a range of these different words in order to answer these different types of topics? That is what range is really referring to. And if you look at these words, let's write them down here. None of these words are actually very, very complex, like learners, teaching, internet, course. These are very, very simple words. But it's impossible to write an effective essay without using these simple topic specific words. So at IELTS Advantage on our VIP course, we do not give students a list of complex words. What we do is we do something completely different, and we're going to show you that at the end of this lesson. So let's look at the topic of health. And let's look at another book called Lifespan. It is about why we age and why we don't have to. So let's create a task two question. So many people have longer lifespans than others. What are the causes? What can we learn from this? Okay, so this book is by Dr. David Sinclair, he's a PhD. He's one of the leading professors at Harvard Medical School. So he's not going to be using very simple, dumb, dumb language. And this is quite a difficult book to read. But if we were to go into this book and look for some topic specific vocabulary, this is what we would find. Active lifestyle, healthy diet, quality of life, stress, longevity. So again, even though this is a professor from Harvard Medical School writing about quite a complex topic, most of the vocabulary that he uses is actually quite simple. None of these words and phrases are actually very, very complex. But what they are, they are completely linked to the question. It is impossible to answer this question effectively without using these topics specific words. It would be impossible to use these words to answer this question effectively. You could go on, this is a book about social media and its effect on our ability to focus and to work. This is by Kyle Newport, I believe he's a professor at MIT, the leading science and engineering university on the entire planet. But if we look at this book and the vocabulary that he uses to talk about technology, again, it is not that complex. He uses words like focus, distractions, concentration, notifications, productivity. Just like these, they are not complicated, complex words. They are topic specific words. Do you need a whole library of books in order to learn this vocabulary? No, absolutely not. Let me jump into my computer and show you where you can find topic specific vocabulary for free and in a place anybody can access. Okay, so if we go to the BBC News and we go over here to the little hamburger menu, sometimes the menu is at the top, shouldn't be too difficult to figure out. But don't look at the headlines. The headlines are normally not useful for our purposes. What we want to do is dig in to these news topics. So these are the main news topics. And as you can see, education, health, science, technology, these are the four most popular task two topics. So what you can do is you can click into any of these. Let's start off with science. So we're going into science and the environment. The environment is a very, very common topic. There's also some science related topics, but mostly it's related to the environment for obvious reasons. If we have a look here at the very first news story, will I still be able to fly in a net zero world? So if we click into this, what this is talking about is reducing our carbon emissions to zero and the effect that this will have on our lifestyle, specifically about flying. Transportation is another very common topic. So if we were to read through this and pick out the topic specific vocabulary, so lifestyle, goal of net zero carbon emissions, just in the first sentence, it's filled with these topics, specific words. So what we get our VIP students to do is simply go to the BBC news each day, find at least one story that could be a task two question, identify the topic specific words, and then note these topic specific words down, add enough information so that they can remember them, and then review them later. And they're able to then use those in their essays to effectively answer the question. What we do not do is it give them a list of complex words, because that simply does not work and that is a misinterpretation of the marking criteria. So if you want more information, go to IELTS Advantage where we make things simple for you, just give you the honest truth about how to improve your IELTS scores and be successful. So if you want more help with vocabulary, just go to the resources section, click on vocabulary or writing task two, click on that and you'll find more resources to help you. You can also sign up for our free fundamentals course, or you can join the waiting list for our VIP course. I hope you enjoyed this video. And I hope it helps you become successful in the future. Thanks.