IELTS|Intermediate|3. Talking about your hometown

Additional information

Listen to two candidates answering these questions and complete the notes in the table

• Can you tell me what you do?
• Where do you come from?
• Can you describe your city /town /village to me?

Look at the questions and the phrases below. Which phrases can be used to answer the questions?

Listen to Hanan and Kwan answering questions. Which phrases are used by Hanan and which by Kwan?

Listen to the answers of the candidates one more time and complete the table

Choose the correct option to complete the sentences from the Speaking section and say whether they are Present Simple or Present Continuous

Present Simple and Present Continuous

Attachments

Find and correct the mistakes in these sentences

Complete these sentences by putting the verb into the Present Simple or Present Continuous

Additional information

Look at the sentences, underline the words Hanan and Kwan should stress. Listen and check. Read the sentences with correct intonation

Pronunciation

Sentence stress

We normally stress the main information in a sentence.

When we answer a question, we usually stress the words which give the answer, or give new information.

Think how you can answer the questions using the useful vocabulary on the topic

1. Can you tell me what you do?
2. Where do you come from?
3. Can you describe your city / town / village to me?
4. What do you like about the area where you live?
5. What things in your town / city / village do you not like?

Useful vocabulary

Discuss the questions with your teacher

Exam tip

• Listen to the examiner’s questions carefully.
• Look confidently at the examiner and perhaps smile a little when you answer the questions.
• Answer the questions openly and, when appropriate, answer with extra details, or a reason.
• Use a range of vocabulary.
• Be ready to offer extra information about yourself and try to speak fluently and confidently.

• Can you tell me what you do? Do you work, or are you a student?
• Where do you come from?
• Can you describe your town or city to me?
• What do you like about the area where you live?
• What things in your town or city do you not like?
• How is the area changing?
• What do people in your area do in their free time?
• What do you think visitors to your town or region should see? Why?

Additional information

Answer the questions and fill in the table. Discuss the exam tips which you learnt today

1. Do you think you did well in this task? Why /why not?

2. What strategies and tips did you use?

Exam tip

• Listen to the examiner’s questions carefully.
• Look confidently at the examiner and perhaps smile a little when you answer the questions.
• Answer the questions openly and, when appropriate, answer with extra details, or a reason.
• Use a range of vocabulary
• Be ready to offer extra information about yourself and try to speak fluently and confidently.

Read the passage and choose the best headings for the paragraphs from the list below

There are more headings than paragraphs, so you will not use them all.

List of Headings

i A truly international environment

ii Once a port city, always a port city

iii Good ports make huge profits

iv How the port changes a city’s infrastructure

v Reasons for the decline of ports

vi Relative significance of trade and service industry

vii Ports and harbours

viii The demands of the oil industry

Look at the following descriptions of some port cities mentioned in Reading Passage. Match the pairs of cities listed below with the descriptions

There are more pairs of port cities than descriptions, so you will not use them all.

What is a port city?

The port city provides a fascinating and rich understanding of the movement of people and goods around the world. We understand a port as a centre of land-sea exchange, and as a major source of livelihood and a major force for cultural mixing. But do ports all produce a range of common urban characteristics which justify classifying port cities together under a single generic label? Do they have enough in common to warrant distinguishing them from other kinds of cities?

A A port must be distinguished from a harbour. They are two very different things. Most ports have poor harbours, and many fine harbours see few ships. Harbour is a physical concept, a shelter for ships; port is an economic concept, a centre of land-sea exchange which requires good access to a hinterland even more than a sea-linked foreland. It is landward access, which is productive of goods for export and which demands imports, that is critical. Poor harbours can be improved with breakwaters and dredging if there is a demand for a port. Madras and Colombo are examples of harbours expensively improved by enlarging, dredging and building breakwaters.

B Port cities become industrial, financial and service centres and political capitals because of their water connections and the urban concentration which arises there and later draws to it railways, highways and air routes. Water transport means cheap access, the chief basis of all port cities. Many of the world’s biggest cities, for example, London, New York, Shanghai, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Jakarta, Calcutta, Philadelphia and San Francisco began as ports — that is, with land-sea exchange as their major function — but they have since grown disproportionately in other respects so that their port functions are no longer dominant. They remain different kinds of places from non-port cities and their port functions account for that difference.

C Port functions, more than anything else, make a city cosmopolitan. A port city is open to the world. In it races, cultures, and ideas, as well as goods from a variety of places, jostle, mix and enrich each other and the life of the city. The smell of the sea and the harbour, the sound of boat whistles or the moving tides are symbols of their multiple links with a wide world, samples of which are present in microcosm within their own urban areas.

D Sea ports have been transformed by the advent of powered vessels, whose size and draught have increased. Many formerly important ports have become economically and physically less accessible as a result. By-passed by most of their former enriching flow of exchange, they have become cultural and economic backwaters or have acquired the character of museums of the past. Examples of these are Charleston, Salem, Bristol, Plymouth, Surat, Galle, Melaka, Soochow, and a long list of earlier prominent port cities in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.

E Much domestic port trade has not been recorded. What evidence we have suggests that domestic trade was greater at all periods than external trade. Shanghai, for example, did most of its trade with other Chinese ports and inland cities. Calcutta traded mainly with other parts of India and so on. Most of any city’s population is engaged in providing goods and services for the city itself. Trade outside the city is its basic function. But each basic worker requires food, housing, clothing and other such services. Estimates of the ratio of basic to service workers range from 1:4 to 1:8.

F No city can be simply a port but must be involved in a variety of other activities. The port function of the city draws to it raw materials and distributes them in many other forms. Ports take advantage of the need for breaking up the bulk material where water and land transport meet and where loading and unloading costs can be minimised by refining raw materials or turning them into finished goods. The major examples here are oil refining and ore refining, which are commonly located at ports. It is not easy to draw a line around what is and is not a port function. All ports handle, unload, sort, alter, process, repack, and reship most of what they receive. A city may still be regarded as a port city when it becomes involved in a great range of functions not immediately involved with ships or docks.

G Cities which began as ports retain the chief commercial and administrative centre of the city close to the waterfront. The centre of New York is in lower Manhattan between two river mouths, the City of London is on the Thames, Shanghai along the Bund. This proximity to water is also true of Boston, Philadelphia, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Yokohama, where the commercial, financial, and administrative centres are still grouped around their harbours even though each city has expanded into a metropolis. Even a casual visitor cannot mistake them as anything but port cities.

Decide if the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage

Choose:

YES if the statement agrees with the information

NO if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this in the passage

Listen and complete the notes below. Write no more than two words for each answer

Read the task and prepare your 3-minute speech on the topic «My hometown»

Speak no longer than 3 minutes.

Cover all of the points, use the active vocabulary of the lesson.

Speaking Part 1

Exam tip

1. Give reasons for your answers.
2. Offer extra details, extend your answer.
3. Sound interested in what you are saying.
4. Speak clearly so that the examiner can hear you easily.
5. Use wide range of vocabulary.

Hometown

• Where is your hometown?
• Do you like your hometown?
• Do you often visit your hometown?
• What is your hometown like?
• What is the oldest place in your hometown?
• What is there for a foreigner to do or see in your hometown?
• How could your hometown be improved?
• Has your hometown changed much since you were a child?
• Is there good public transport in your hometown?
• Do you think your hometown is a good place to bring up children?

Useful language

Allow your browser access to your microphone, press the button «Record» and record the speech you have prepared