IELTS TOPICS: WEATHER

Posted by David S. Wills | Oct 10, 2019 | IELTS Tips | 0 |

There are certain topics in the IELTS exam which can be considered quite common. They are
not guaranteed to appear in your next exam, but they are common enough that you really
should spend some time studying them. One of these super common IELTS topics is weather.

I’m sure that when you first began learning English, you learned to talk about the weather. In
my first teaching job, I taught this topic to kindergarten students. Even those cute little 3-year-
olds could say, “It’s a sunny day!” or “It is raining.” Of course, for IELTS you need to be able to
produce more advanced language than that!

Today, I want to tell you all about weather as a topic for your IELTS test. I’ll explain a little
about how it might appear in the exam, and also give you some useful language for
describing it.

IELTS SPEAKING QUESTIONS ABOUT WEATHER

The IELTS speaking test is by far the most likely part of the exam to contain questions about
weather. This topic could appear in any of the three parts of the speaking test, but it is most
likely to occur in part one as the topic is rather shallow. In part one, you aren’t expected to say
very much, and so this is the best place for simple questions about things like weather. Here
are ten example questions about weather from IELTS speaking part 1:

What’s the weather like where you live?

Does the weather affect your mood?

Do you like sunny days?

What type of weather do you like best?

Does the weather ever affect what you do?

Does it bother you much when it rains?

What do you like to do on sunny days?

Does it rain a lot in your hometown?

Which months have the best weather in your country?

Does rain ever affect transportation in your hometown?

All of those questions are quite simple, factual matters. There is no real complexity to them
because they would be asked in part one and you will only be expected to give a basic
answer. For example, let’s look at two of the questions from above:

1. What’s the weather like where you live?

It rains a lot in my hometown, even in the summer. Sometimes it’s sunny but it’s never
really very warm.
2. What type of weather do you like best?

I really like warm, sunny days the best. When the weather is like that, you can go out
and do interesting things rather than being stuck indoors.

You can see that in those answers, I have given only two sentences as a reply. You might
think that this is not enough, but actually it is perfectly fine. Notice that I also didn’t use any
complex vocabulary. This is also acceptable because for part one the questions really will be
simple. You might have a chance to show off more in part three, but don’t worry about it.
Sometimes it’s best to use simple language with a high degree of accuracy.

Part two is a little harder to predict, and it’s less likely that you will get a weather question
here, but it could still happen. Two cue cards that you might possibly encounter will ask you to
do the following:

Describe your favourite kind of weather.

Describe a time when you experienced extreme weather conditions.

In each case, you would need to follow the cue card and give an appropriate response. Here
is a video about describing a season, which has some overlap with the topic of weather.
Part three might have questions about weather as well, but remember that here they will be
more complex and abstract. In this section, questions often get into morality, gender, age, and
other difficult issues. There isn’t really too much that could be said about weather here, but
you might find something like the following:

Do you think that weather affects people’s behaviour?

Notice that this is similar to a question from part one, but now we are talking about people in
general, rather than your personal opinion. This is much harder to do, and of course here you
are expected to speak for longer. You might give an answer like this:

I think that weather definitely affects people’s behaviour. You just have to go outside on a
sunny day to see how friendly people are compared to when it’s raining. Also, when the
weather is really bad you see people looking depressed and often acting with impatience
towards others. People do things like fight over taxis or push rudely past each other when
it’s rainy and cold. So, yeah, it definitely has an impact.

This answer is much longer than my first ones, and you can see how each sentence sort of
adds a little more to the idea. There is also a basic introduction and conclusion as I tell my
listener what I think and then summarize what I said. But is there much difficult weather
vocabulary? Not really. There isn’t too much that you can really say in a question like this, as
it relates more to a person’s mood than actual weather.

WEATHER FOR IELTS WRITING

It is less common that you will encounter the topic of weather for IELTS writing, but it could
still happen. For one example, you may see weather appear in task 1 as you have to describe
patterns of rainfall or hours of sunshine. However, this really wouldn’t require much
knowledge of the weather, as you are just expected to describe what you see.

For task 2, there is definitely more scope but the topic of weather is a bit limited. Instead, you
would probably see it arise within the greater topic of environment. For example, look at the
following question and sample answer. I will highlight some useful vocabulary that may be
helpful for you in giving more complex descriptions of weather and the related issue of global
warming.

IELTS WRITING TASK 2 QUESTION: WEATHER

Global warming is one of the biggest threats to our environment.

What causes global warming?

What solutions are there to this problem?

SAMPLE ANSWER
It is clear that the earth’s climate is changing due to human activity. The weather is growing
increasingly erratic, and temperatures are soaring in many places. This essay will explore
the reasons for this, as well as some possible solutions.

Our modern style of living is causing huge damage to the planet in a number of ways. For one
thing, people want constant comfort in their homes, and this means huge amounts of
energy must be generated to provide them with electricity, not to mention the production of
goods that make them feel happy. As such, power stations and factories around the world
churn out huge volumes of emissions that go straight into the atmosphere and cause
terrible damage. This is compounded by emissions from cars and airplanes, which are also
continually rising as the population grows and people become more mobile. Altogether, these
cause global warming by changing the earth’s atmosphere and trapping heat.

The problem needs to be dealt with immediately or else there will be no chance of saving the
planet later. Governments around the world need to work together to stamp out toxic
emissions from factories, power stations, and transportation. Once lowered, these should
also be offset by planting more trees to replace carbon dioxide with oxygen. Doing all this
will take a massive effort, but it is important that the world is in agreement. Primarily, the
responsibility falls on the shoulders of governments, who will need to impose regulations to
stop corporations and individuals from perpetrating more destruction upon the
environment.

In conclusion, the earth is dying because of human actions, and the whole world will need to
act immediately to reverse the damage.

IELTS READING AND LISTENING TOPIC: WEATHER

I don’t really recommend preparing for IELTS reading and listening in terms of topic because
actually the topics here are much wider, particularly for reading. In the reading test, you could
be given a passage about almost anything, and for listening the final lecture is pretty much
the same. Theoretically, any of those could well relate to weather, but you wouldn’t really be
expected to know that much about it. Instead, you’d just be expected to have the basic
English skills required to pick apart the grammar and main ideas.

Of course, knowing about the weather is useful and you should definitely study it. Reading
and listening to English sources like news articles is always helpful and if these are about
weather, it may give you a slightly better chance at IELTS listening and reading. (Pro tip: Try
watching the weather forecast in English.)

IMPORTANT LANGUAGE FOR DISCUSSING THE

WEATHER
As we have seen, most of the questions that are likely to arise in IELTS relating to the topic of
weather are actually quite simple, and you wouldn’t need to know complex terminology for the
topic. It would be enough to know words like hot, cold, rain, sun, etc. Of course, you also
need to know the noun and adjective forms:

Noun Adjective

Heat Hot

Cold Cold

Sun Sunny

Rain Rainy

Wind Windy

Fog Foggy

Most that is pretty simple, but if you want to impress the examiner a little more, you can try
using slightly more specific language. By this, I mean that you don’t just have to say “rain” or
“rainy.” It rains a lot in the UK, so we have many words for this type of weather. 😄

We can use other nouns to describe particular kinds of rain:

Drizzle

Shower

Downpour

We can also use an adjective to modify the word “rain”:

Driving rain

Pouring rain

Light rain
 Heavy rain

Torrential rain

Freezing rain

Source

We could also use some verbs to talk about how it was raining:

The rain battered down around us.

It was pouring rain all night.

 The rain seemed to go right through us.

It just sprinkled down for an hour and then stopped.

You see, it is possible to extend your vocabulary a little from “rain” to using a wider range of
language. None of those words or phrases is particularly “advanced” but they all offer a
chance to go beyond the most basic and obvious term.

GRAMMAR
When talking about weather, there are different types of word that we can use. I showed you
above that we can vary how we talk about rain by using verbs, adjectives, and nouns. Well,
that is possible for some types of weather.

We can say “it is + adjective”:

It is sunny.

It is rainy.

Or “it is a(n) adjective + day”:

It is a sunny day.

It is a rainy day.

We can also say “it is verb+ing”:

It is raining.

It is snowing.

Or we can even use “there +noun”:

There is snow outside.

There will be thunder later.

Some words can be adapted to all forms:

It’s raining! (verb)

It’s rainy! (adjective)

There’s been a lot of rain recently. (noun)

However, others can’t:

It’s sunning!
 It’s sunny!

There’s been a lot of sunshine recently.

Here is a PPT I made for my former students. It contains some interesting language about
weather. I recommend that you download it and play it on your computer so that you can
challenge yourself without seeing the answers first.

Intermediate Weather Vocabulary for ESL from David Wills

SEASONS
I would like to mention here that I have missed out some apparently obvious questions from
above. The questions I might have also included were things like, “What’s your favourite
season?” Actually, I feel that there is a slight distinction between seasons and weather, and
so I will keep this particular article devoted to the latter. If you want to learn how to talk about
seasons for IELTS, you can check this link.

It could also be argued that there is some crossover into the topic of climate change and
environment because obviously the current phenomenon of global warming is related to the
weather. However, I will also leave this aside for now and just focus on more basic weather
questions.