Technology Vocabulary for ESL and IELTS

hello and welcome to another episode of Tad's IELTS I'm David wills and today we're looking at vocabulary for technology so technology is a really important part of the modern world and as such it's an important part of the IELTS speaking exam in fact it could occur in any part of the IELTS exam but it's most common in speaking you'll increasingly hear questions not just about computers but also about phones tablets about apps about streaming all these things are really important in our modern life and so they're they're possible to encounter in the IELTS exam so

today we're going to look at the vocabulary you need to know in order to do well in this topic [Music] first we're gonna look at hardware hardware means the physical items of technology for example a computer is a piece of hardware but also the different parts of a computer like the keyboard the monitor and so forth so first we can see two kinds of computers what kind of computers are they and I don't mean the brand Dell and HP on the Left we have a desktop computer and on the right is a laptop computer we

might also call a desktop computer a PC which stands for personal computer and some people would call a laptop a notebook computer next what can you see in these two images well we can see that these are Kindles Kindles this is a kind of ebook reader or e-reader we can use these to read digital books some of them have a touchscreen that means a screen you can use by pressing it with your finger this looks similar to the Kindle but it is not a Kindle of course you can see in the bottom left there is

an Apple iPad we can see though that the other two are from different companies so what is the generic name for this kind of hardware it is a tablet tablet again a tablet has a touchscreen in fact that's a very important part of a tablet the most popular one is the iPad but there are others and so instead of just saying iPad we call them all tablets it is larger than a mobile phone but more portable than a laptop portable means you can take it around easily next we can see these phones on the right

there is an iPhone we call this a smart phone smart phone a smart phone is a kind of mobile phone that is able to do far more things than old-fashioned mobile phones again they have touchscreens and these days we install apps on them app is short for application usually they will have at least one camera although nowadays typically your phone will have two or three cameras they can play music access the internet they can function as GPS devices and so on next we will look at some software software so when hardware describes the physical parts

of technology software refers to the digital products such as computer games such as the programs on your computer or some apps that is the first word and app where I live in China people call this an AP P that is how they say it in Chinese and many students say that in English as well this is not correct though and you should not say that in the IELTS exam app is short for application and whilst it is spelled a P P we pronounce it a p-- this is a relatively new word we used to say

program a computer program but nowadays probably because of Apple and their App Store people refer to computer programs for their phones or other mobile devices as apps you can download an app and there are many thousands of apps that let us do lots of different things these are social networks social networks a social network is an online platform where you can communicate with other people it may function as a website or an app or increasingly both the most popular ones are Facebook Instagram Twitter snapchat but there are many many of them all around the world

you can do things like communicate with friends share photos play games and so on what is this we can see here Internet Explorer Google Chrome Firefox Safari these are what we call browsers browsers technically we should say web browser as this is a program that allows us to visit websites and use the Internet we use the verb browse to talk about looking around online the noun browser is the program we use what about this kind of software up above we can see WordPress down below blogger these are two different blogging platforms this is how you

could create a blog blog blog is short for web blog although these days nobody says web blog it is a personal website or it could be a business website as supposed its main feature is that it's easy to post regular updates the verb post can also be used as a noun to make a post I'm sure some of these look very familiar to you we're all inundated with this sort of image in our daily lives and doesn't matter where in the world you live when you turn on your phone or computer you see some of

these pictures these are called memes memes a meme is something that is shared widely these days we mostly refer to me as a picture with some words on it that is intended to be funny here we can see YouTube you're obviously familiar with YouTube because you're watching me on YouTube right now YouTube is a kind of video streaming service video streaming the verb to stream means to download something off the internet directly instead of storing the file on your computer to watch later you watch it immediately you can stream live sports or you can stream

movies or TV shows YouTube is of course the most popular streaming service but there are many others like Hulu and Netflix everyone in the world knows Google but what is Google what kind of service is it we use Google as a verb but technically we should be saying search when we want to search the internet we use a search engine search engine we use a search engine to find things online finally we come to a few other items of vocabulary these are some words it didn't quite fit in previously but are very important these are

verbs that we use in common daily life now the first day share share now share used to mean especially for two children to both use the same toy however nowadays share is very very common because on social networks you can share a picture or a song or video or many different kinds of things with others shares are very important part of our modern economy here are some examples of how it could be used sarah shared a really funny video last week i'm trying to get more subscribers on my youtube channel could you share my new

video please the next is like like interestingly light used to just be a verb but now it is also a mound give me a like like is used commonly in all almost all social media platforms as a way of giving approval to something here are some examples hey everyone don't forget to like my new video and subscribe to the channel my ex-husband liked all my new Facebook posts what do you think that means next is friend friend so we can use the phrase add as friend but this has been reduced down to just friend now

so while like was a verb that became a noun friend is a man that became a verb I can friend someone on Facebook it means to add them as my friend here are three examples he added her as a friend on Facebook last week do you mind if I friend you when I get online later she just added him earlier today was that a good idea if you've enjoyed this video I do hope you'll give it a like maybe you can go friend me on Facebook and I'll see you again next week when you come

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