IELTS TOEFL Academic Vocabulary: Family

hi everybody welcome to write to the top I'm Adam in today's video I want to look at some more vocabulary because I know people need vocabulary people like to learn new words so I'm gonna give you some IELTS and TOEFL specific vocabulary that you can use when it comes up in your essay topics and we're looking today at family now a lot of these words may be already familiar to you some of them are basic words you learn in ESL classroom but I'm gonna give you a little bit more specific ones and a few alternatives that will be very helpful to you so we're gonna start with family types and family members now you know brother-sister husband-wife all these things so we're gonna start with the family types the nuclear family this is your immediate family the ones that live with you in your house in a in an average house this is who lives in it brother sister mother father spouse the wife husband sibling brother sister and then kids and all that so that's your nuclear family that's your immediate family then beyond that outside of your house you have other family members this is called your extended family because you extend outside of the nuclear that's grandparents aunts uncles net niece nephew cousins etc again all of these words by now should be pretty basic and standard to you now you can also add to your family right you can have in-laws so you have brother-in-law sister-in-law mother-in-law father-in-law etc the main thing I wanted you to focus on is plural so we don't say brother-in-law's we say brothers-in-law sisters-in-law parents-in-law okay so this is family that you basically add to your family through marriage when you marry someone that person's family becomes your family but they become family in law so one's in-laws now you can also use in-laws as a noun to talk about the whole group all the family members that are family to you through marriage are your in-laws and you use that as well then you have step-siblings now this is a bit more common in the last century or so but a step-sibling so when a couple divorces or maybe a couple one of the members one of the couple dies and they have a child if the parent that remains remarries gets a new husband new wife then the relationship between the new husband or new wife and the child is step so if my mother married another man that man would be my stepfather I would be his stepson and vice versa stepmother stepdaughter etc so again it's by marriage but by second marriage and then you have half siblings when you have one common parent to two children they are half-brother half-sister so one mother but two separate fathers then your halves or one father two different mothers they're half siblings so one shared parent okay notice also I have the - and I have the - when I talk about stepbrother stepsister etc so family types okay so now we have other words for other family members that are not immediate or extended not nuclear or extended okay when we have when we talk about distant family we mean like a cousin's child or a cousin's cousin or some sort of relationship to your family some sort of blood relationship but not really a close connection so you don't they're technically family but you don't really even know this person very well and we've we can say this is a family relation so this person you don't really know this person very well but there is some sort of blood connection like aunts cousins daughters son whatever like all kinds of different lines of blood flowing but you don't really know this person very well so a stranger with blood connection is a family relation or it's a distant family now more and more common expression these days so we also talked about different trends different the way things change in terms of talking about a family so we have something called a blend did family so you have a family that got like the parents got divorced but they have kids so let's say this man has two kids he meets a woman she also has two kids they get married and they all live together in the house so the the husband and wife and the four kids lived together we call this a blended family because they're taking two separated families and putting them together to make a new family okay a very common expression these days a bit trendy expression then you can have an adopted child or adoptive parents so if you go to another country like if you can't have your own child or if you just want to help another child you take from different parents and you make it this child as your own you adopt a boy you adopt a girl from your own country from your own race or other countries other races for example the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have adopted many kids and Madonna's adopted a bunch of kids etc a foster parent so if you are if you have a house and you basically help children move from one situation to another you are the between face so let's say a child lost his or her parents in an accident there's no one to take care of this child so they come to live in your house you're the foster parent you take care of them until the state or the government can find someone willing to adopt this child or until the child is old enough like I'd say 18 and then goes on and lives his or her own life so you foster them you take care of them until they can go somewhere else or on their own okay another very common situation these days is a single parent single mom single dad this is a parent who got divorced or lost a husband or wife and is raising a child alone so there's only one a one parent household we can say okay and again also becoming more and more popular these days a stay-at-home dad it used to be that the the woman the wife had a child maybe she would give up her job she would stay at home for a few years to take care of the child until he or she can start school and then maybe she'd go back to work and the husband would just go to work and make sure that everything is paid for now as with more and more women are getting into the workforce and getting high positions high paying positions they become the breadwinner the breadwinner is the person who makes the income for the family or the higher income and the father stays at home to take care of the kids this is becoming more common more acceptable this is less of a stigma attached to it fifty years ago a man wouldn't do this because all the other men would laugh at him today it seems to be no problem so it happens again we're talking about how families change over time now before the family there's a marriage so I'm going to give you some vocabulary for marriage because this is still related to family so marriage everybody knows nuptials so like you usually we say nuptials with an S but technically it's nutshell is the noun form it basically means a wedding okay it's another way to say wedding matrimony is another way to say marriage and you can use wedding the ceremony when you get married but make sure you understand you can also use the verb to Wed to Wed someone means to get married to someone okay but not everybody wants to get married especially young people today they're quite happy just living together without going to the church without going to City Hall signing papers and making everything legal so if they live together for a long period of time it's different the amount of time depends on the country depends on the state the province etc but after a certain amount of time of cohabitation means living together they become common-law partners and their their situation is called a common-law marriage they didn't do it through a ceremony they didn't do it through paperwork they did it just by habit okay they live together cohabitation doesn't mean habit habitation means living together but they live together that living together becomes a habit they get used to it so that's how why their common law common law comes from like a law the British law Canadian law etc so very common these days just live together and after a few years the government just looks at you like you're married and they give you the same tax breaks and the same rights when it comes to your finances basically of course the same-sex marriage a gay couple or a lesbian couple are getting married more and more more and more countries and cities and provinces and states are making it legal in a lot of places it's still illegal in places where it's legal it's becoming more popular it's a gay or lesbian marriage couple and there's also something called an arranged marriage an arranged marriage like the woman's parents find the man's parents they say ok we can make a good match here my daughter and your son should get married sometimes the husband and wife meet for the first time at the wedding ok that's an arranged marriage these days it's very uncommon they generally meet before and makes they still have to like each other at least a little bit but basically it's not not so much a love marriage it's a more of a business relationship if you want to look at it that way so that's called an arranged marriage now a few other good words that you need to know about so I mentioned nuptial before that's basically wedding so a prenuptial agreement this is very common among wealthy people so if I'm a very rich man I have have a billion dollars and I meet a woman but I want to make sure that she's not marrying me for my money so I ask her to sign a prenuptial agreement this is basically a contract and it states that if we get divorced after a certain time or before a certain time I don't have to give her half of my money ok if she doesn't want to sign it maybe I'm a little suspicious if she does want to sign it it means she loves me and everything's ok that's again that's more for rich people to worry about so ice mentioned arranged marriage so the person who does this would be a marriage broker or a matchmaker a matchmaker doesn't have to be like in the agent it doesn't have to be an arranged of marriage even friends who introduce their friends to each other they're also called matchmakers you're creating or you're making a match between people before you get married there is a period of engagement or you get engaged means it's like a promise to get married and then the man it becomes a fiancee and the woman becomes a fiancee notice 1e for the man to ease for the woman if you don't write the accent the French accent on the e don't worry about it in if you're doing handwriting it's okay to let it go when you're typing on a word or like some word processor it'll put the accent automatically so it's fine next so you're married now you're having some problems so in most cases people get separated when they go live in different houses and after one year if they're if they're sure that they don't want to get back together then they get divorced so separated means this move out divorce means you sign paperwork and you legally end the marriage but then there are some people who are simply estranged they're not just separated separated means you're living in different houses but you're still talking to each other estranged means you split apart and you don't talk to each other at all in many cases these people estranged couples are still married but they just hate each other so much that they can't even get together to speak to arrange a divorce it happens you can also use estranged with family members estranged father estranged son means haven't spoken to in a long time have no relationship with anymore and if you if someone loses a husband or wife a widow basically is a woman who lost her husband whose husband died a widower is a man whose wife died okay so these are all that basically the vocabulary you're gonna look at today now a common sometimes you'll see a topic on the IELTS or TOEFL essay how has the family unit changed over the last 50 years okay so you can start using some of these words the average size of the nuclear family has decreased it used to be like to point to kids average now to 1.8 or 1.9 so basically the replacement rate the reproduction is a lower than a replacement to read which means the population is going to start shrinking because the families are getting smaller family roles are being redefined for example the breadwinner the person who makes the most money is no longer automatically the man of the family as more women join the workforce indeed the instances of stay-at-home dads is on the rise in many Western nations they so roles are changing men are staying at home women are going out to make the money it happens it is not uncommon to see blended families on holidays or even single parents with their children engage in group activities as a sort of makeshift extended family so it's not a real extended family there's no blood relationships but you get a bunch of single parents with their kids together they create their own pretend family they they get so close that it's like family okay you can you can think of very close friends as family as well right so it's makeshift same-sex and common law oh sorry I put a little extra space here there shouldn't be a space same-sex and common law partnerships are also on the rise becoming more popular with the rates of adoption among these groups rising accordingly so common law partners and same-sex couples obviously same-sex couples can't naturally have kids so they adopt or they make other arrangements like in vitro and all that okay and that's it so hopefully some good volk out here hopefully some new vocab here for you remember if you want to actually know how to use these words use them don't just try to memorize write sentences share with your friends get some feedback on them if you can okay and that's the family so if you have any questions about this video please ask me the youtube comment section if you like the video please like don't forget to subscribe you can just click this button up here to subscribe to my YouTube channel don't forget to visit right to top calm for more useful information and I'll see you again next week with another video bye bye

Channel: Write to the Top

Views: 68,541

Keywords: IELTS, TOEFL, English writing, writing skills, language test, English grammar, English vocabulary, high score, how to write an essay, essay writing, test tips, English, writing, English test, synonyms, IELTS high score, TOEFL high score, lexical resource, language skills, IELTS writing, TOEFL writing, academic writing, academic vocabulary, family vocab, vocab variety

Id: PGs6Bl4hWfE

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 15 2019