Do you know what it means to "wreak havoc", "spell disaster", or "prompt speculation"? In this lesson, you will learn how to use advanced expressions that describe cause and effect. These types of expressions will certainly increase your writing score in the IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC, or any other English test. Use any of these expressions in your writing, and you are guaranteed to impress your teacher, professor, or examiner!
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TRANSCRIPT

Hi. My name's Rebecca from www.engvid.com. Now, everyone knows that to improve your English, you need to expand your vocabulary. Right? True. But in today's lesson, I'm going to show you the key to not just expanding your vocabulary, but expanding... But really transforming your vocabulary. And, how is that? That's by learning something called "collocations".

What are collocations? Collocations are word combinations, or two or more words that are used together very frequently. So, rather than just learning one word, if you learn the expression, you learn how that word is used, what verb goes with which noun, etcetera, then your vocabulary will sound much more advanced, much more natural, and much more fluent. This is very important if you want to impress people when you're speaking, and extremely important if you want to get high marks in any English proficiency exam, such as the TOEFL or the IELTS.

Now, there are all kinds of collocations in English about everything that you can imagine, and that's what makes the difference, sometimes, between whether someone really knows the language or not. It's not just a matter... It's not only a matter of knowing the word, but knowing how to use the combination of words, the collocation. All right?

So, in today's lesson, we're going to look at six kind of advanced collocations that have to do with cause and effect. Now, you can always say that something made something else happen, and that's English, too, and it's perfectly fine to say that. But if you want to say things in a more sophisticated way, in a more intelligent or educated way, then you'll want to use the expressions which I'm going to teach you. All right? So, let's have a look.

So what I've done, I've written some words in red and some in black. So, all of the words in red here at the top basically mean "caused". Okay? And everything on this side means the effect. All right? So these words are words we can use... These are synonyms for "caused" or "made something happen" and this is the effect of it. So, let's look at some examples in sentences.

"The govt's policy produced the results..." Okay? So, you can't say: "made the results" or: "did the results", but you can say: "produced the results". All right? So, the collocation is "to produce results" or: "to produce the results". So: "The govt's policy produced the results that we expected." Or: "The govt's policy didn't produce the results that we expected." All right? So, that's the collocation there. That's the expression that you can learn.

Let's look at another example. "The election provoked an outcry..." Now, again, "provoked" has something to do with caused. So, "to provoke" means to cause in a rather aggressive manner. Okay? So, to provoke. Provoke what? An outcry. Now, what is it..? What is an outcry? An outcry means public anger. All right? So, it's talking about something happened and it caused, in a very kind of an aggressive way, a response, an angry response from the public. So, it provoked an outcry. All right? You could say: "The election results provoked an outcry from the people."

Next: "The blizzard wreaked havoc on the highway." All right? Now, what's a blizzard? A blizzard is a very heavy snowstorm, for example. So: "The blizzard wreaked havoc..." "Wreaked" we said all these words mean "caused", it's another word for "caused". And "havoc", what is "havoc"? "Havoc" means damage, destruction, confusion. Okay? So, the blizzard, the very heavy snowstorm caused a lot of damage and destruction on the highway. So, it wreaked havoc. Now, of course, if you say that, you can always say: "The blizzard caused a lot of damage." Or: "The blizzard caused a lot of destruction." And that's fine. That's correct English, too, but this better English.

All right. Next. "The strike spelled disaster for the economy." for example. Right? So, again, "to spell" in this case doesn't mean like spelling. Okay? It has a different meaning here. Here, "to spell disaster" means to cause disaster. And what's "disaster"? Means something very, very, very bad; a very bad event, a very bad happening, very serious issues and problems. A disaster. So, the strike caused disaster or spelled disaster. Okay? On the... For the economy.