IELTS Plus: Episode 56 - Globalization

Good day, and welcome to another episode of the IELTS Plus English podcast, where today I'm afraid we have a difficult topic. It's globalisation. I did notice this topic coming up in the near future and I saw globalization. I thought, oh, that's going to be a tough one. What I'd like to start by talking about today is this concept, and we're going to talk about this much more, and perhaps you've heard it before, but it's the concept of bringing answers, bringing topics.

This is so important when you come to a topic area that you are uncomfortable with. It might be... Economics. It could be technology. Here's a great example, actually. If you go back to my episode about AI, and I love AI, but I don't... know a great deal about it. And the part two question was pretty tough. I've had a few people listen to that episode and say, Jack, was that a good answer that you gave? Was that...

relevant? I feel like you're talking about something different to the question. The answer is, and you can see this in the comments, please go back to the AI episode. Yes. I purposely moved that question into my world, my world of business and coaching. And although I did that, and by the way... it was great because I was able to speak comfortably, I did still address the question. The content was relevant. And because I was comfortable, I was able to use really good language. So...

What does this all mean? Bring the topic into your own world. You have things in your life that you know about, you enjoy. For example, your job. Your hobby or hobbies, your likes, your interests. These are all the same kind of things. For me, you know, I love reading. I am interested in technology.

I do love golf, travel. I have some good experiences in travel that I can draw upon. So these areas I know, if I can bring the answer here to these... comfortable areas i can speak really comfortably i can say a lot this means Let's say, for example, you have, and I talked about this recently because it was a real example. You have a question about globalization. You say, Jack, I do not know. I don't.

I barely know what it is. I don't know how that's affecting my country. You can probably, if you are interested in cooking, talk about... ingredients that have come from around the world and they are now in your country. If you're a golfer, are you seeing more foreigners playing golf? Any sport, are you seeing more foreigners? Maybe you love your city. How's your city changed? Are you seeing more foreign restaurants? So...

If you go through my entire syllabus, you will identify topics that are outside of your comfort zone. And I want you to think carefully. You've got to spend time on this. Think carefully how to bring them into your comfort zone, how to bring any question into something you can talk about. And that's all I want to say. I did say a lot then, but let's get started. So firstly, student challenge. What evidence of globalization can you see in your hometown?

I'm asking this because I'm curious. Where are you from in the world? Tell me where you're from and what evidence can you see of globalization? Are there more restaurants? Is there more foreign food, foreign people? Let me know. And today, yeah, it's a difficult topic and therefore there are difficult words. We've got integration. Tariff, diversify, vibrant, lovely words, but it's going to be tough. It's going to be tough to get these in the answers. This is, of course, available in my textbook.

which is called the IELTS Plus Total Speaking Textbook, and it's available for you on www.britplus.net.

Go and check it out. It's helping a lot of students and I've had some great feedback, so I hope it helps you too. Let's get into it. Part one, question one. What do you understand? by the term globalization i think globalization is this uh rapid change that we see around the world where it's becoming easier to go to different countries to spread ideas to spread culture a great example of this is how k culture we call it korean culture

has spread around the world so easily. And now you can go to a small town in the UK and have Korean food. Okay, I kept that pretty light, but I'm pretty happy with that answer. Let's do another one. What are the main benefits of globalization? Of course, one of the main benefits is trade. and being able to get new types of products, perhaps for more reasonable prices nowadays, the spread of culture, the spread of ideas.

I think there's so many benefits that we're seeing from globalization, and I certainly enjoy them here in South Korea. Excellent. Let's get into a part two. So today's part two question is describe how globalization has affected your country. Now. That's an interesting one to get into my structure. So I haven't prepared. Let's see how I get that into my past, present, future structure. So I've put two minutes on the clock and my time starts now.

I'd like to tell you about how globalization has affected South Korea. I first came to South Korea about 15 years ago. It's been a long time. And when I did... It felt so different to back home in England. It was really, you know, Korean culture was so strong and we had all the traditional food. But there was a real lack of things like coffee shops and Western-influenced food. These kind of family restaurants were not so popular. Wine.

coffee, some of these products that were so big back home or in the US were not so prevalent here. And that made it a little difficult for me to... integrate into Korean society. So I kind of suffered a bit from culture shock. Let me tell you a little bit more about globalization in Korea and how it's changed so much.

So certainly in the past 10 years, it's changed really rapidly. And all these things I've just said are now readily available. I see such diversity of... products available um i think there's a lot of sort of free trade agreements now available or have been set up so we're getting more well-priced you know, wines and foods from around the world. And it's also affected restaurants as well. A huge number of Mexican, Italian.

Spanish restaurants and they're very popular and it's really made Korean food very exciting as well. We see more combinations, fusion food of Korean and other countries. I also noticed... Oh, there's so much to say. So much to say. Well... I think I'm quite happy with that answer, but obviously I didn't make that much progress with my structure, with my strategy. But, you know, I got a few words in there.

A bit of a diversity of the tenses, the grammar tenses. But yeah, loads more to say. I won't. I'm going to move straight on to part three now. So...

How has globalization affected the economy of your country? Globalization has really diversified the things available. in uh korea so you know economy wise i assume that that has affected the way money is spent and what it's spent on We can see all different types of shops and restaurants and things like that. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, because of globalisation and the spread of Korean culture...

we see a lot more tourism and that's becoming a big source of income for Koreans. So, for example, you can go somewhere like Itaewon. which is a region of Seoul, and see far more foreigners there and very successful businesses. I think you can see many places around Korea that are profiting from tourism. What are the disadvantages of globalization? I think the major disadvantage of globalization perhaps is that with the increased tourism...

you can see increased pollution. I think because of globalization, I think we can definitely put it down to that, the spread of culture and the... movies and dramas and things like that. It encourages people to travel more. It's becoming easier to travel. And you can get people, much more people, traveling to these beauty spots and more obscure parts of the world. And that, for the environment, is a bad thing.

So, you know, in my case, I went to an island in the Philippines called Boracay. And I always remember that example because... It was full of litter, and I think that's probably down to a huge number of tourists traveling there and spreading litter and not being so careful with the environment. You could see the beach. inland the sea actually in the sea there was a lot of rubbish which was a real shame

Good. Okay. I'm trying to give clear examples today. I think I've used that before. By the way, this is an example of bringing an answer into my own world. The disadvantages of globalization, I don't know. I don't know that many, certainly off the top of my head right now, but I can talk about travel.

I can talk about tourism. That's comfortable for me. So that's what I'm doing. Next question. Do you think globalization will continue to grow in the future? Yeah, I think... it's absolutely going to grow in the future um it of course depends on The way that culture is spread and things like, as I said before, dramas and movies, that's becoming easier with things like Netflix. So that's going to encourage globalization. But in terms of trade.

If we are going to get more free trade agreements between countries and there are going to be less tariffs. You know, we see these tariffs being created between countries that disagree with each other. If that can happen, less tariffs. then yes, globalization is going to continue to grow, continue to spread, and we're going to see the most isolated parts of Earth.

more visibly and we're going to visit those places. So yeah, I do think it's going to continue. Great. So as you heard today, I think that's what... You can hear throughout my answers, I really focused on the travel part of globalization. That's only one part of globalization, but that's what I'm comfortable with. My answers were relevant. I was able to use some of the vocabulary. And because of that, I'm happy with my answers and I think it would be a good score. So that's everything today.

I think that was a pretty long episode, so sorry about that, but I do hope it was helpful. Next week, we are going to be having a bonus episode. I've decided based on a student's question, we've got a bonus episode. We're going to really dig deeply into part three answers. So do come back for that. So I'll see you next week. Study incomprehensibly hard this week. And I will see you next week. See you then. Bye-bye.