IELTS vocabulary, by topic

A list of clever words is the slowest way to raise your lexical resource score: single words are hard to place in a sentence, and a word used slightly wrongly costs more than the plain word it replaced. Examiners reward phrases that sound natural and precise together — collocations, not vocabulary lists — which is why every topic here is a set of phrases with the sentence they live in. Each page groups them by band, shows the upgrade from the obvious phrase to the better one, and ends with a self-test so you find out which ones actually stuck.