IELTS / TOEFL Academic Vocabulary: Environment

hi everybody welcome to write to the top I'm Adam in today's video we're gonna look at vocabulary a little bit more and today's topic specifically is the environment or environmental issues pollution etc I'm gonna look at environment in general give you some good words to use when discussing the environment we're going to look at pollution as a specific issue and the consequences of pollution or environmental actions bad actions that people take and we're going to look at these because these are the most common aspects of the environment that come up in IELTS and essay topics for essays okay now this is not a complete list there are a lot of other words that you can find and use but this will this is a good collection of words to get you started now if you haven't already started working on an idea Bank I highly recommend that you do so now you can make an idea bank for environmental issues and started with these vocabulary topic these words I'm gonna give you and then work your way up make more collect questions etc if you're not sure what an idea Bank is here's a link up top here that you can follow to find out more about that and start working on it so let's dive in let's look at the environment so here are some good words that you're gonna use when you're talking about general environmental issues you're going to talk about biodegradable now biodegradable or to degrade means to break down into smaller parts that can be reabsorbed by nature so when we're talking about bio bio means life or organic we're talking about organisms so we're talking about organic materials things that you can basically throw out in the garbage and nature will somehow recycle by herself into usable nutrients again so again what are you talking about food if you throw out your apple core on the street not a problem the Sun and bacteria or other animals will break it down it will decay it will become nutrients that absorb into the ground and used for plants and get back into the natural cycle of things you can also use use organic materials to compost to compost means to again it's a recycling but our organic materials you're getting the nutrients out of them you're creating like nutrient-rich soil that you can then use as fertilizer to grow plants and things like that so biodegradable this is good very good for the environment things like plastic or metal anything that's non organic is non biodegradable means it can't break down it can't be reused by nature so these are the things that hurt the the environment hurt nature not good things biodiversity so again we're looking at bio as a prefix it means life diversity of life so a variety of life forms so people always talk about like environmental diversity use this word biodiversity when you're talking about different things animals plants insects etc and again you're gonna use this word in combination with habitat a habitat is the environment of living things a particular environment so for example certain animals live in forest habitats certain animals live in jungle habitats desert habitats mountain habitats all kinds of different habitats if you're talking about the earth the planet this is the habitat of all living things carbon-based organisms like humans animals plants be careful not to confuse habitat with habitation habitation you're going to use to talk about people where people live homes houses etc and inhabitant an inhabitant you can use with habitation or with habitat so the inhabitants of a habitat are all the living things in that particular environment ok all the if you're talking about the forest all the animals all the birds all the insects that live in that habitat they are all inhabitants now ecology and ecosystem people often confuse these two words but they are different ecology mostly we use to talk about the study of ecosystems let's go to a ecosystem first an ecosystem is the environment and everything inside of it you can talk about particular ecosystems just like you can talk about habitats so habitats and ecosystems can be synonyms but you can use ecosystems to talk about nonliving things as well if you're talking about computers or a computer network within an office you have the this offices computer ecosystem basically everything that is included inside that particular group I guess you could say that works together ecology is the study of this particular group or place and it's also the relationships of everything inside that particular group or place okay so within the ecosystem and then the ecosystem itself now conservation and preservation in most cases you can use these as synonyms if you're talking about basically protecting the environment or protecting something there is a slight difference though conservation basically means using wisely so for example if you wanna if you're looking at forests let's look at forests again a concert conservation approach means every time you cut down a tree you plant a new tree that way one tree is less one tree is up everything balances out and you can maintain or you can use this forest for a very long time preservation means just keeping it from harm so for example if you have a forest and all the trees in the forest are 500 years old if you cut one down if you plant a new one it will take 500 years to replace so that doesn't really make much sense so these forests would be five hundred year old trees we want to preserve means we don't cut that the trees at all we just keep it as it is and leave it alone and save it basically protect it next we have the food chain the food chain is basically who or what eats what so we have human generally at the top of the food chain we can eat everything around us and nothing really eats us and carnivores so when you're talking about in the jungle or the forest or whatever the lion for example is the top of the food chain in these the safari areas in the wild in the jungle if you talk about the ocean you have the great white shark or the killer whale at the top of the food chain the smaller animals which eat smaller animals which eventually you get small enough that they start eating plants okay so plants are at the bottom so you have grass the cow eats the grass humans eat the cow and that's three steps in the food chain when you're talking about wildlife so people use this word a lot wildlife but you can also use marine life if you're talking specifically about the ocean you can use flora and fauna flora plants fauna animals this is a very good car location so these are all car locations here this bottom line here is all call locations and then you have eco friendly so everybody uses environmentally friendly you can also say eco friendly just to have a little bit of variety in your in your language so now let's look a little bit at pollution and when we talk about pollution means air land sea etc and we also have pollutants the things that create pollution the things that pollute basically the verb now greenhouse gases I think most people know have heard this expression before a lot of people separate the two words green house if you say green house you're talking about a house that's green and that doesn't really mean anything so make sure you understand one word and gases this is the spelling of the plural ah greenhouse gas or many greenhouse gases they include carbon dioxide again dioxide is one word don't split die oxide which I've seen many people do methane is another common one if you think about livestock like sheep and cows you know they eat a lot of grass and they release some sort of gases from parts of their body that gas is called methane aerosols these are the this is the gas that comes in cans if you have like hairspray and you press the button and the spray comes out there's a gas inside the can that pushes the spray out that gas is aerosol these are very bad for the environment and basically all hydrocarbons anything that comes out of burning when you burn coal or oil or wood any fossil fuels then you're releasing hydrocarbons into the atmosphere and generally we can see this in the air as smog when you're outside and the air is not very clear it's not smoke and it's not a cloud but it looks like a little bit of a combination of both that's just pollution and we call that smog and all of these things when we're talking about polluting with carbon-based gases or materials we are leaving our carbon footprint so environmentalists and people who want to save the environment basically want to reduce human beings carbon footprint the basically what we leave behind in terms of carbon on the earth now when you're talking about gases they usually are released as fumes so if you think about your car from the exhaust in the back you're releasing gases these are called fumes or they're called emissions and the verb is to emit and this comes from burning fossil fuels and again fossil fuels coal oil gas things like that things that have been around in the earth for a long time and we burn them next when we talk about farming or growing vegetables and fruit farmers use a lot of pesticides these are chemicals that basically kill insects and other like bacteria and viruses that harm the plants so they spray them with pesticides or chemical fertilizers that kill all these organisms and these also pollute the environment the chemicals get into the ground into the water they spread they do a lot of damage especially to humans and animals solvents these are liquids that are combinations of chemicals used to work with other chemicals okay they're mostly not water that's the key here so when you're talking about solvents you're talking something like paint thinner if you have paint on your wall and you want to remove it you use paint thinner you make it like very soft and then you just wipe it away very very bad very toxic chemical detergents like soap dish washer soap laundry soap these are all bad for the environment now when we're talking about waste we could talk about solid waste which is basically garbage or things that are left over from use toxic waste again pesticides emissions these are all toxic like poison hazardous basically means dangerous right so when you're talking about manufacturing the manufacturing process companies that produce things eventually they use oil they use chemicals they use all kinds of things to make their products especially plastic and there's always a byproduct there's something left over from the production process and then they have to get rid of that sometimes it spills into the rivers sometimes it just goes into the ground and it is absorbed by the ground spreads in the water line very bad landfills so if you ever wonder what happens to all the garbage that you throw out at home you put it in a bag you put it in a box you don't think about it again but in some countries some countries just burn all the garbage and then they're basically adding to the greenhouse gases other countries they take all this garbage and put it in a landfill so it just it says an empty area and they just throw all the garbage there and then you have mountains of garbage some of it is biodegradable which is fine it's just basically decays and goes back into the ground a lot of it is toxic and this goes into the ground into the water and spreads now leak spill and slick when we use these words when we talk about oil that is spilled basically accidentally if you have a ship carrying oil and it hits an iceberg and the ship breaks and all the oil comes out on top on the surface of the water you'll see a large slick coming out of the container that's called a leak or a spill and then the slick is basically what you'll see on top of the water sometimes on top of the land mostly we're talking about oil or a toxic waste very poisonous covers the animals the wildlife the marine life and eventually gets into our food chain okay and next we have sewage so all the water in your toilet and your bathtub and your sink goes down all these little pipes and all the drains or in the streets you'll see the sewage drains all the water goes in with all the dirt and all the chemicals and all the poisons and it gets into the sewage now in most cases that will go through a treatment plant the treatment plant will use solvents or other and all kinds of different chemicals to clean the water and recycle it and get it back into use so you can shower again with clean water but this the more sewage you have the more bacteria and viruses and all kinds of nasty things grow in there if they're not properly treated they get into the water system they spread the poison some verbs to contaminate basically means to make unpure unclean pollute we already know the same idea to threaten so all of these different pollutants threaten the environment they threaten the animal life the flora and fauna they threaten humans because they're poison right they're not good to ingest and some species become endangered so pollution in dangers some species if you cut down forests certain birds and animals have nowhere to live their habitat is destroyed if you let more and more pollution enter the environment you're threatening wildlife you're in danger endangering certain species okay so far so good now some consequences if you put all of this together what happens well first of all let's talk about some natural disasters these are things that happen that are very catastrophic that create a lot of damage and they're natural and I'll talk about that in a second so the main ones are earthquakes volcanoes typhoons tornadoes hurricanes monsoon tsunami blizzard etc the problem is these are natural there's nothing we can really do to stop these things but the more we pollute and the more we destabilize the environment the higher the frequency and the greater the intensity of these disasters it doesn't mean that they will they if we stop polluting these things will stop happening but now they are happening more regularly they're happening faster and when they happen they're stronger and they create a lot more damage than they used to in the past so we are contributing to the intensity of these disasters and again if you don't want to talk about disaster some synonyms catastrophe a very bad thing that happens calamity synonym devastation devastation is like a physical destruction when you have an earthquake and the whole country shakes and everything breaks and all you see is rocks because all the buildings fell down and all the trees fell down that is devastation which is a catastrophe for humans and animals etc a calamity is a very tragic very bad thing okay makes you sad basically some other things that we human actions cause and pollution also causes deforestation the more trees we cut down the less force they are forests there are the more pollution we introduce into the systems into the ecosystems trees die out plants die out there's less forest desert if vacation which is a strange word deserts actually grow they spread so you have very very dry land and then you're taking the water from the other areas and then the dryness spread the desert becomes bigger that's what this is and erosion as planets die there's nothing holding the ground together right so the ground starts to break apart or erode is the verb so if the ground starts to fall apart and then starts to fall so with all these things deforestation desertification erosion we have droughts and famines a drought means when there's no rainfall for a long time or no water is available in a certain area the land becomes dry nothing can grow when nothing can grow then you have famine people can't eat there's mass starvation in a particular area the hotter the earth gets glaciers melt the ice caps on the mountains melt and then you have flooding so all the water from the mountains and glaciers they come rushing down and they make land full of water and that's flooding erosion there's no trees to hold the ground together so landslides land slides off the side of a mountain and crushes villages below it of course dry and no rain makes fire another way to talk about the drought is you talk about parched or arid land means parched is like very thirsty very dry arid also means very dry and you talk about fertile or infertile fertile land means it's very easy to grow things they're like plants vegetables etc in fertile if the land becomes too dry and there's no nutrients in it you can't grow anything there then you have your famines again again pollution endangered species so an endangered species is a group of animals it is about to disappear and will never come back or it will die out or it will go extinct so these are all more or less synonyms and depending how you use them obviously verbs and this is an adjective with a noun okay so a lot of new words for you here here are just some examples of how to use them in a paragraph right so you all the words that I listed or that I spoke about here I put into italics so you can see them here's a paragraph the coming you of these words I'm actually using in one paragraph and here's a couple more in one sentence I can use a whole bunch of these words and a whole bunch of these words again lexical resource is a very important part of your writing score in the IELTS and the TOEFL make sure you have a good variety of words you don't want to necessarily force synonyms and you don't want to force words just make sure that you're using them at the correct context make sure there's a reason to use them that they make sense and give yourself a whole bunch of options to discuss all of these different types of topics okay and that's basically it's very straightforward start building your idea banks start collecting vocabulary and questions and sample essays about the topics that you think might be on the exam and start working them and that's how you succeed okay if you have any questions about this video please ask me in the youtube comment section and come back next week I'll have more vocab grammar writing tips all kinds of different stuff okay see you then bye-bye

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Keywords: IELTS, TOEFL, English writing, writing skills, language test, English vocabulary, test tips, English, English test, vocabulary, independent task, English skills, test preparation, IELTS high score, TOEFL high score, lexical resource, language skills, collocations, IELTS high band, IELTS Reading, TOEFL reading, IELTS writing, TOEFL writing, vocab building, academic writing, academic vocabulary, writing task 2, vocab variety, word usage

Id: IOFBx1ac-JA

Length: 21min 22sec (1282 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2019