AIELTS

📝 Articles Day 6

‘The Odyssey’ Review: Christopher Nolan Crafts High-Minded if at Times Snoozy Spectacle Out of an Episodic Journey Led by a Brooding Matt Damon

Christopher Nolan’s passionate love affair with the Premium Large Format moviegoing experience peaks with The Odyssey, a gigantic undertaking that marks the first feature shot entirely with IMAX Film Cameras. The result is a meditative action movie both immense and intimate, albeit one whose flow is impeded by the inherently episodic nature of the nonlinear source material and some questionable casting choices. Still, audiences hungry for the kind of brawny all-star spectacle now largely confined to sci-fi and comic book tentpoles should turn out for this bold retelling of Homer’s epic poem.

It’s ironic, given the foundational influence of the text on modern Western storytelling, that there has never been an indisputably great screen version of Homer’s Odyssey, though Nolan, who also penned the adaptation, gets closer than some. The poem built the template for the Hero’s Journey, shaping literature’s approach to character, adventure and conflict in a narrative that encompasses mortals, gods and monsters, history and mythology, tests and triumphs. 

But it’s less surprising when you consider Homer’s disjointed structure, starting in medias res then folding in flashbacks while stringing together isolated encounters over a 10-year period, like stories within a story. 

Then there’s the protagonist, Odysseus — played here with introspective intensity by a commanding Matt Damon — whose internal transformation, from a hubristic warrior to a man humbled by trauma and loss, is as near to a continuous plotline as the movie gets. It’s hard to effectively dramatize someone piecing together memory fragments on a gradual path to moral, spiritual and existential awakening. 

Harder still when much of that process happens in a dream-like haze on an island beach, where the nymph Calypso (a distractingly contemporary Charlize Theron) is keeping Odysseus as her lover, feeding him lotus petals to ease the pain in his body and prevent him from remembering the loyal men he lost along the way — even if it’s ostensibly to spare him that psychological torture. These dull interludes stop the narrative dead in its tracks, recalling Sean Penn’s purgatorial wanderings in Malick’s The Tree of Life.

From hollywoodreporter.com

Model answer ✅

From the line graph, we can see the average monthly rise or fall in how much copper, nickel and zinc cost throughout 2014.
Overall, nickel started with the highest percentage change of the three but ended with the lowest. Zinc started with the smallest change and ended with the highest, and copper prices fluctuated. Prices for all three metals dipped in June.
In January the price of nickel was up tix per cent, but this dropped to negative three percent in June, ending the year with a one percent increase in both November and December. Copper began the year with an increase of two percent and by May, the price was dropping (by slightly less than one per cent). It rose again, increasing by a percentage point in July, August and September. Zinc saw its most dramatic increase in February, with three per cent and the price fell in June (a one percent decrease). The change, was negative until October/November when it began to rise.
(165 words)

EXAMINER’S EXPLANATION ✅
This response reports the main data for each of the three metals. There is an introduction in the first paragraph and an overview in the second, followed by the presentation of the main trends of all three categories in the third. Some details are missing (copper after September and no percentage changes for any metal from July to September).
The candidate identifies the 'dip' for all three in June, but to score more highly, they could also have mentioned that overall, percentage changes fell at the beginning of the year, remained static from July to September and rose after October to the end of the year.
Information is arranged coherently; each metal is taken in turn for data reporting. There is good use of cohesive devices [Overall / but / with / when], but there could be more.
Vocabulary is adequate with some attempts to use less common items [fluctuated / dramatic increase] and attempts to use synonyms [ended with the lowest / dipped dropped].
There is a lack of complex structures, as most sentences are simple or compound. However, there is some variety in structures, including comparatives [highest / smallest / most dramatic] and continuous tenses [was dropping].
To improve the response, the candidate could extend the overview to reflect some common trends and should include some of the missing details.

From ielts.writing.info

📝 GUYSS, сегодня тренируем IELTS Writing Task 1 (Line Graph)!

1️⃣ Сначала поставьте таймер и напишите эссе самостоятельно.

2️⃣ Затем проверьте себя: сравните свою работу с Model Answer и прочитайте Examiner’s Explanation, чтобы понять, что можно улучшить.

Удачи! 💙💙💙

WRITING TASK 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on this task.

The graph below shows the average monthly change in the  prices of three  metals during 2014.

Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features and make comparisons where relevant.
Write at least 150 words.

📝 Articles Day 5

Can't Sleep? Try Getting Out of Bed

It’s 2 a.m., and you’ve been awake for an hour—staring at the same patch of ceiling, counting the same sheep, and doing increasingly alarming math about how wrecked you’re going to feel tomorrow. Your instinct is to stay right where you are and try harder. Surely sleep will come eventually. And even if it doesn’t, at least you’re resting—right?
Not exactly. The better move, sleep specialists say, is the one that feels most counterintuitive: Get up, leave the room, and do something else. The technique is called stimulus control, and it isn't new—psychologist Richard Bootzin introduced it in 1972, and it remains a cornerstone of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia.

Why lying in bed when you can't sleep makes it worse
The problem begins when you treat sleep like a task you need to accomplish. "Effort is the enemy of sleep," says Shelby Harris, a behavioral sleep medicine specialist in New York. The harder you work at it, the more frustrated and alert you become. People who sleep well, Harris points out, aren’t using some secret trick. “They don't really do anything,” Harris says. “They just fall asleep.”
Sleep, in other words, isn’t something you can will into happening, says Michael Perlis, director of the behavioral sleep medicine program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. It’s a physiological state, not a behavior you can perform on command.
Watching for sleep to arrive doesn’t work, either. People often report that they were close to drifting off, Perlis says, but if you’re conscious of being close, you’re still awake. After all, how can you consciously monitor yourself becoming unconscious? 

There’s one more argument for staying put: Even if you aren’t sleeping, you figure, at least you’re resting. Perlis rejects that one, too. "If rest was any good,” he says, “we wouldn't sleep.”

And the next time you’re lying awake at 2 a.m., furious that sleep hasn’t arrived, remember: The wakefulness isn’t necessarily the biggest problem. Your reaction to it might be. "Change the narrative," Harris says. "Trying to force it is only going to make it worse."

From time.com

Кажется, этим летом было 2 главных события
для всех и для меня тоже 😋

1. Чемпионат мира по футболу

После ЧМ-2022 я начала больше интересоваться футболом, поэтому этот чемпионат был для меня особенным. Столько эмоций и моментов, которые останутся в памяти 💔

А так как с самого начала я болела за Испанию 🇪🇸 и вы понимаете мои эмоции 🤌🤌🤌

2. Человек-паук: Новый день

Как верный фанат ЧП, конечно же, я не могла пропустить это 😭
Я так долго ждала этот фильм, но у нас в кинотеатрах он выходит только 6 августа.. 💀

И конечно же, на этой неделе я пересмотрела ВСЕ части Человека-паука 👀

А что было главным событием этого лета для вас?
И ждёте ли вы новый фильм?🕷️

📝 Articles Day 4

Spider-Man: Brand New Day Proves That You Can at Least Try to Build a Better Marvel Movie

At the end of 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, Tom Holland’s Peter Parker/Spider-Man is a young man adrift. His best friend, Jacob Batalan’s Ned, and his girlfriend, Zendaya’s MJ, have been right by his side through most of the movie; at the end, a mystical spell erases their memory of him, ostensibly forever. His Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) has died as the result of a fireball assault by Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), who, in his human guise, is a man she’d tried to help. Peter is too sunny to let his isolation harden into bitterness, and he’s still dedicated to fighting crime in his hometown of New York City, but he’s miserable, and this is where Spider-Man: Brand New Day begins. “Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing even if it breaks Peter Parker’s heart,” he explains in the movie’s opening scene, a statement potent enough for three semesters’ worth term papers on the nature of duality.

You can’t really explain the plot of Brand New Day without giving away the arrival of a surprise character, but here, roughly, is how it goes: Sad Peter Parker goes through the motions of being Spider-Man for four long years, as MJ and Ned study hard at MIT, the college the three of them were supposed to attend together. After graduation, MJ and Ned return to New York; Peter spies on them wistfully, and when he finally does get up the guts to talk to them, his face draws blank stares. He regularly leaves fresh flowers at Aunt May’s grave. The rest of his days are spent foiling workaday crimes, until some weird events shake the city: an unseen force capable of taking control of people’s bodies and brains has begun to wreak mayhem.

Meanwhile, both Peter Parker and Spider-Man are sad, angry, frustrated, and guilt-ridden: These aren’t just teenage emotions, but adult ones, and it’s clear that Brand New Day is hoping to push Marvel product into more emotionally sophisticated territory. That’s not a bad impulse: It seems that even Marvel’s key audience of the early 2000s has outgrown the old formula of massive special-effects scenes interlaced with numbing proclamations about evil forces threatening to destroy the world.

In Brand New Day, feelings may be taken seriously, but they’re also treated as problems to be cycled through.

But if nothing else, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is proof that you can at least try to build a better Marvel movie—even with its flaws, this one is superior to most. That’s partly thanks to Holland, a smart, sensitive actor who, inside a stretchy suit or not, takes his character’s emotional travails just seriously enough. It doesn’t hurt that as MJ, Zendaya is allowed to do more than scowl disapprovingly. In both The Odyssey and the Dune movies, her spark has been sacrificed to the gods of serious acting, and not for the better. She’s best when there are beats of uncertainty in her dialogue. She shouldn’t be playing roles demanding grandeur and nobility; they only crush her spirit. Brand New Day, at the very least, shows some awareness that actors, and not excessive, soul-killing special effects, are what will keep drawing us to the movies. Everything else is just a distraction from faces, and maybe one that we can’t afford.

From time.com

Heyyy!!
Пропала на неделю 🫣

Но я снова здесь 🤍
Возвращаемся к подготовке к IELTS 📚✨

📝 Articles Day 3

Сегодняшняя статья не сложного уровня и довольно интересной темы для многих, поэтому прочитайте до конца 🙌

ON THE DESIRE FOR FAME

We don’t always feel comfortable admitting it to our friends; it is embarrassing. But, secretly, the idea of being famous has great appeal.
Fame is deeply attractive because it seems to offer very significant benefits. The fantasies go like this: when you are famous, wherever you go, your good reputation will precede you. People will think well of you, because your merits have been impressively explained in advance. You will get warm smiles from admiring strangers. You won’t need to make your own case laboriously on each occasion. When you are famous, you will be safe from rejection. You won’t have to win over every new person. Fame will mean other people will be flattered and delighted even if you are only slightly interested in them. They will be amazed to see you in the flesh. They’ll ask to take a photo with you. They’ll sometimes laugh nervously with excitement. Furthermore, no one will be able to afford to upset you. When you’re not pleased with something, it will become a big problem for others. If you say your hotel room isn’t up to scratch, the management will panic. Your complaints will be taken very seriously. Your happiness will become the focus of everyone’s efforts. You will make or break other people’s reputations. You’ll be boss.

The desire for fame has its roots in the experience of neglect, in injury. No one would want to be famous who hadn’t also, somewhere in the past, been made to feel extremely insignificant. Perhaps one’s parents were hard to impress. They never noticed one much, they were so busy on other things, focusing on other famous people, unable to have or express kind feelings, or just working too hard. That’s why one dreams that one day the world will pay attention. But even if our parents were warm and full of praise, there might still be a problem. It might be that it was the buffeting and indifference of the wider world (starting with the schoolyard) that was intolerable after all the early years of adulation at home.

What is common to all dreams of fame is that being known to strangers emerges as a solution to a hurt. It presents itself as the answer to a deep need to be appreciated, and treated decently by other people.

To sum up: fame really just means you get noticed a great deal – not that you get understood, appreciated or loved.
At an individual level, the only mature strategy is to give up on fame. The aim that lay behind the desire for fame remains important. One does still want to be appreciated and understood. But the wise person accepts that celebrity does not actually provide these things. Appreciation and understanding are only available through individuals one knows and cares about, not via groups of a thousand or a million strangers. There is no shortcut to friendship – which is what the famous person is in effect seeking.

At a collective, political level we should pay great attention to the fact that, today, so many people (particularly young ones) want to be famous – and even see fame as a necessary condition for a successful life. The desire for fame is a sign that an ordinary life has ceased to be good enough.

The solution is not to encourage ever more people to become famous, but to put massive efforts into encouraging a greater level of politeness and consideration for everyone, in families and communities, in workplaces, in politics, in the media, at all income levels, especially modest ones. A healthy society will give up on the understandable but erroneous belief that fame might guarantee the kindness of strangers.

From theschooloflife.com

📝 Articles Day 2

The Odyssey is fiction. But its monsters and magic may have been based on real science.

Odysseus faced the cyclops, his men turned into pigs, and he sailed between a six-headed monster and a whirlpool. Each of these, it turns out, have potential real-life explanations.
The Odyssey is a myth. It’s doubtful that a man took a literal decade to make it from Troy on the coast of modern-day Turkey to the Greek island of Ithaca after the Trojan War, cursed to make love to witches, journey to Hades, and pick fights with a cyclops. Or at least, if he did take that long, his curse probably involved not asking for directions.
But the tale of Odysseus’ extra-long journey home contains hints of things that people might have encountered in the ancient world, from a real-life cyclops to killer whirlpools and hallucinogenic plants. As Matt Damon steps into the famous wanderer’s sandals in The Odyssey on July 17, here are some of the scientific realities behind his legendary side quests.
The cyclops
In the story, the cyclops Polyphemus—a giant with a taste for human flesh, and of course, only one eye in the center of his head—traps Odysseus’ crew and munches a few for lunch. Odysseus blinds Polyphemus with a heated spear, and the men make their escape, tied to the bellies of Polyphemus’ sheep.
One hypothesis for the origin of this mythical one-eyed giant lies in the fossils of Deinotherium giganteum, an elephant relative that roamed Europe, Asia and Africa between 23 and 8 million years ago. Paleontologists have unearthed its bones on the island of Crete, where the ancient Greeks could have come across them as well. Elephant skulls have relatively small eye holes, with a massive hole in the center. That hole is for the trunk. But as the elephants stood 15 feet (4.6 meters) tall at the shoulder, the huge skull might have been mistaken for the head of a huge, one-eyed person.
But the Greeks could also have been familiar with cyclopia, a rare and deadly congenital defect where the eye sockets and brain don’t properly divide as the human embryo develops. Instead of a nose, the fetus grows a tubular appendage, which usually appears above a single eye. Cyclopia occurs in only one out of every 100,000 human births. Sadly, 39 percent are stillborn, and those that survive birth do not survive longer than 13 hours.
While it is a very rare condition, scientists have estimated that at the time of The Odyssey, about 53 cases of human cyclopia would have been born around the world every year. In addition, other species can also exhibit cyclopia, including sheep, cattle and goats, especially if the mothers eat plants like hellebore.

From NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC

ДАААААА🇪🇸🇪🇸🇪🇸🇪🇸

📝 Articles Day 1

Spain vs Argentina: Your ultimate tactical guide to the 2026 World Cup final

Finals do not get more mouthwatering than this.
On one side, you have the most complete, cohesive team in the tournament, with a 19-year-old superstar in their ranks in Lamine Yamal. On the other, a nation led by the best player in the history of the sport in Lionel Messi — now 39, but still capable of deciding the biggest matches almost single-handedly.
Sunday’s World Cup final will be contested by Spain and Argentina, and there are narratives to be unpacked all over the pitch.
Spain arrive in a men’s World Cup final for only the second time, after their victory in the 2010 edition, with a squad who could match the glory of that generation — and a playing style that is not dissimilar from their golden era. Argentina are in their seventh FIFA final, only Germany/West Germany (eight) have played in more, as they look to retain their world title four years on from that incredible game against France in Qatar, where they won on penalties after a 3-3 draw.
After 103 matches played in an expanded 48-team format over five weeks, just two nations remain.
This is The Athletic’s definitive data and tactical preview of the 2026 World Cup final.
It feels laughable to think that Spain’s tournament-winning credentials were questioned after their opening game.
A goalless draw with first-time qualifiers Cape Verde back on June 15 felt like an embarrassment to the European champions at the time, but a stubborn defensive block and an inspired goalkeeping performance from 40-year-old Vozinha managed to keep them at bay, despite their 27 shots and 74 per cent share of possession.
It has proved to be the only blot on an otherwise flawless World Cup page for Luis de la Fuente’s side, who are yet to fall behind at this tournament and have only conceded one goal in their seven matches — in the quarter-final against Belgium.
The Athletic’s forecast model gives Spain the edge, with a 59 per cent chance of victory to Argentina’s 41 per cent.
Neither nation has made a habit of losing in recent years: Spain’s last competitive defeat came in March 2023 away to Scotland during qualification for a Euros they subsequently won, and Argentina haven’t been beaten in knockout-phase football since a 2019 Copa America semi-final against Brazil in Brazil. They have won three major tournaments on the bounce in the years since.
Something has to give tomorrow. May the best team win.

From NYTIMES.COM

❤️‍🔥 Решила начать новую рубрику.

Теперь каждый день буду выкладывать одну статью с сайтов, стиль которых максимально похож на тексты из IELTS Reading.

Так вы сможете не только расширять словарный запас, но и постепенно привыкать к формату и лексике, которые встречаются на экзамене

💙 Немного из моего опыта.

Сейчас я сама занимаюсь на курсе. Прошел уже месяц, впереди остался еще один.

Честно говоря, после начала обучения я поняла, что, скорее всего, смогла бы подготовиться самостоятельно. Наверное, было бы достаточно купить только feedback по Writing.

Но при этом я не жалею.

Мне нравится мой курс, есть живые уроки, четкие дедлайны, постоянная обратная связь и ощущение, что я не одна.

Когда занимаешься вместе с другими ребятами и менторами, гораздо легче сохранять дисциплину.

При самостоятельной подготовке риск забросить занятия выше.

📚 Как выбрать правильный курс для подготовки к IELTS?

Стоит ли покупать курс или можно подготовиться самостоятельно?

Всё зависит от вашего уровня и количества времени.

Если у вас уверенный B1, вы уже примерно знаете структуру экзамена и до IELTS осталось около 4-5 месяцев, то вполне реально подготовиться самостоятельно.

Что можно импрувить самому:
• Listening
• Reading
• Speaking

А вот для Writing я всё же рекомендую купить проверку эссе (feedback) у опытного ментора.

Если же у вас осталось 2–3 месяца, вы готовы учиться интенсивно и ещё не знакомы со структурой IELTS, то курс может стать хорошим вариантом.

На курсе обычно:
• подробно объясняют структуру экзамена;
• разбирают все типы заданий;
• дают стратегии выполнения;
• помогают составить план подготовки и регулярно проверяют прогресс.

📌 Ваш балл зависит не от курса. Результат всегда зависит от ваших усилий и дисциплины.

Daily motivation 🔥

Winners and losers have the same goals.
– Atomic Habits

Цитата дня 🔥

Losing sleep for your goals is better than dreaming about them.