Speaking: Weather and Seasons Vocabulary Pack

Weather may appear in IELTS Speaking, but it is not guaranteed in every test or as the opening topic. A possible Part 1 question is What's the weather like today? Relevant detail and appropriate natural expressions can help show vocabulary ability; marks are based on the whole performance using the official criteria.

Don't settle for just saying It is sunny. Add feelings and details:

• It's absolutely freezing out there — I should have worn a thicker coat.
• It's boiling today, so I'm trying to stay in the shade.

Note: freezing and boiling already have a strong meaning; in standard usage we do not normally strengthen them with very. Choose absolutely or really when appropriate. In the later model, quite modifies the gradable adjective in quite chilly; do not attach it automatically to every extreme adjective. We will practise with an expression bank in the following sections.

The five expressions below are the basic tool of the weather topic. They are heard often in everyday speech and show the examiner that you know real, natural English:

A few important subtleties:

• freezing and boiling already have a strong meaning: absolutely freezing is correct, very freezing is incorrect.
• drizzle is an uncountable noun: say a bit of drizzle or light drizzle.
• bucketing down describes heavy rain; the verb form supplies the time, so it is not limited to the present: Look outside — it's bucketing down!
• the height of summer is for pointing to a specific period and works very effectively in comparisons.

When talking about seasons, a bare I like summer leaves your answer weak. Expressions that describe the season as an event bring your speech to life at once:

• Spring arrives early here — by March, everything is in blossom.
• Summer sets in around June, and the whole city comes alive.
• Autumn kicks in with grey skies and shorter days.
• In the dead of winter, it gets dark before six o'clock.

For practice, you can try season + weather + activity: When summer comes around, we head to the coast almost every weekend. This illustrates how vocabulary and grammatical structures can combine. Both criteria are assessed across the whole performance; one sentence does not earn marks automatically.

Use the height of summer when it fits the comparison: Even at the height of summer, it rarely rains in our region. A detail or comparison is useful when relevant to the question; do not force in an expression merely to make the answer seem deeper.