Band 9 vocabulary isn’t obscure—it’s precise, topical, and collocation-rich. Here’s a curated bank for 2025 topics.
Topic 1: Sustainability & climate
Useful sets: ‘decarbonisation agenda’, ‘renewable infrastructure’, ‘circular economy initiatives’. Pair them with verbs such as ‘accelerate’, ‘incentivise’, ‘scale’.
Create mini-dialogues using the vocabulary so you can recycle it naturally in Speaking Part 3 discussions about policy and innovation.
Topic 2: Education & technology
Try ‘immersive digital classrooms’, ‘adaptive assessment tools’, ‘credential inflation’. Show you understand trends not just vocabulary.
Link each phrase to a statistic or real-world example (e.g., referencing online degree adoption) to anchor your ideas in Writing Task 2 essays.
Topic 3: Healthcare & wellbeing
Use collocations like ‘preventive screening programs’, ‘telemedicine adoption’, ‘holistic wellbeing campaigns’.
Record voice notes using these phrases in different grammatical forms to ensure you can conjugate them quickly during the Speaking test.
Make vocab exam-ready
Organise flashcards by concept, add sample sentences, and record yourself using each set in Speaking answers to ensure pronunciation accuracy.
Schedule spaced repetition reviews and challenge yourself to use each item in Writing Task 1 data descriptions as well as Task 2 arguments.
Key Takeaways
- Learn word families plus collocations.
- Tie vocabulary to current affairs.
- Practise pronunciation alongside meaning.
Final Thoughts
A lean, topic-driven vocabulary bank beats encyclopedic lists. Curate 10 sets per theme and recycle them across Writing and Speaking for immediate lexical gains.