Vocabulary
The words you need whenever the topic is traffic, commuting or travel. With a practice exercise.
IELTS vocabulary for transport carries a great deal of weight for a single topic. Traffic and public transport appear in Task 2 essays, in Academic Task 1 charts about journeys and car ownership, and in speaking questions about how you travel and how your city has changed.
The words below are grouped the way examiners would expect you to use them. Learning ten at a time and putting each one into a sentence about your own city works far better than reading the whole list once.
The words
Six groups. Learn one group at a time rather than the whole page.
To commute — to travel regularly between home and work.
Public transport — buses, trains and other shared services.
A fare — the price of one journey.
A season ticket — one payment covering many journeys.
Rush hour — the period when roads and trains are busiest.
Traffic is uncountable, so write too much traffic, never too many traffics. Transport is uncountable as well: there is no a transport.
British English uses transport, American English uses transportation. Either is accepted in IELTS, but stay with one throughout a piece of writing.
Congestion — too many vehicles for the road space available.
Gridlock — traffic so heavy that nothing moves at all.
A bottleneck — a narrow point where traffic slows.
A bypass — a road built around a town so through traffic avoids the centre.
A congestion charge — a fee for driving into a city centre.
Infrastructure — the roads, railways and services a country depends on.
A network — the whole connected system of routes.
An interchange — a point where passengers change between services.
Light rail — a tram or small urban railway.
A cycle lane — part of the road reserved for bicycles.
A stopover — a short stay in another city during a long journey.
A domestic flight — one within the same country.
A carrier — an airline or shipping company.
To check in — to register before a flight.
A connecting flight — the second flight of a journey with a change.
Emissions — gases released by vehicles.
Car ownership — the number of people who own a vehicle.
To subsidise fares — to pay part of the cost so passengers pay less.
To pedestrianise — to close a street to vehicles.
Park and ride — parking outside a city and taking a bus in.
Method
Six ways these words earn marks rather than just filling space.
Congestion is more precise than a lot of cars, and gridlock is stronger again. Choosing between them shows range as well as accuracy.
Congest, congestion, congested. Pollute, pollution, polluted, pollutant. Four forms give you four ways to build a sentence.
You ease congestion, cut emissions, expand the network, miss a connection and get stuck in traffic. Wrong pairings are noticed even when both words are real.
Academic Task 1 often shows journeys by mode or car ownership over time, and the vocabulary above lets you name what the chart shows instead of describing it vaguely.
How can cities reduce traffic? Should city centres ban cars? Is public transport better than driving? These recur, and having the vocabulary ready saves thinking time.
Write about your own commute. A word learned inside a sentence about your own life is remembered far better than a word learned from a list.
Practice
Choose the word that fits each sentence.
Read the whole sentence before you choose. Several options will be real words, and often more than one will nearly fit.
The test is precision: which word means exactly what the sentence needs?
1Choose the correct sentence.
Too much traffic. Traffic is uncountable, so it takes much and never a plural or an article. If you need a countable noun, use vehicles: there were too many vehicles.
2Traffic so heavy that nothing moves at all is called ______.
Gridlock. Congestion means the roads are crowded and slow. Gridlock is the extreme case where traffic has stopped completely, so keep it for that.
3A road built around a town so through traffic avoids the centre is a ______.
A bypass. An interchange is where passengers change between services, and a network is the whole connected system rather than one road.
4A short stay in another city partway through a long flight is a ______.
A stopover. A connecting flight is simply the next flight you take. A stopover implies you stay in that city for a while rather than changing planes and leaving.
5Governments ______ fares so that passengers pay less than the real cost.
Subsidise. To pedestrianise is to close a street to vehicles altogether, which is a different policy with a different purpose.
6Which phrase describes parking outside a city and taking a bus into the centre?
Park and ride. A congestion charge is a fee for driving in rather than a scheme for leaving the car outside, though cities often use both together.
That is a collocation problem rather than a vocabulary one, and it is very hard to spot in your own writing because every word looks correct on its own.
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Recognising a word in a multiple choice is not the same as producing it accurately under time in an essay.
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Yes. It appears in Task 2 essays on traffic and city planning, in Academic Task 1 charts on journeys and car ownership, and in speaking questions about how you travel.
Transport is British English and transportation is American English. Both are accepted, but keep to one of them within a single piece of writing.
No. Use too much traffic and heavy traffic. If you need a countable noun, switch to vehicles or cars.
A fare is what you pay to travel on a bus, train or plane. A fee is paid for a service or for permission, such as a congestion charge or a licence.
Yes. Lexical Resource assesses precision as well as range, so an ambitious word used slightly wrongly scores lower than a simple word used correctly.
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Technique takes most candidates to about Band 6.5. Past that, the limit is usually the range of language you can use accurately, and knowing where you stand is the first step.
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