[0:00]Hello, everyone. I'm your IELTS Tutor Jack and welcome to another episode of the IELTS Plus Podcast. Remember, all materials for the podcast are free handout with all of the questions and vocabulary is available on jacks-english.com. Jack's hyphen English dot com. Or for my Korean students come to my neighbor Cafe, just search Yonguk Yong or Jack's English on Naver Cafe and you'll find me very quickly. As I said, sign up and you'll get everything for free.
[0:40]Today's topic is art. Not a strong topic for me. Last episode I felt very confident. I'm not so confident this time. So, we'll go through a few questions part one, maybe a part two and definitely some part three. And I will try to include as many key vocabulary and expressions from the handout in my answers. Okay, we'll start with part one just to warm me up because I really feel like I need it. The first question is as follows, what kind of art do you like? I'm not a big fan of art, especially when it comes to painting and drawing, but I I prefer to look at realistic art. I don't really understand abstract work. Um, I I'm not very good at kind of understanding the meaning of an abstract concept, an abstract piece of uh painting or drawing. So I prefer something realistic, the more realistic, the better. And uh I tend to prefer the artist to paint mountains or countryside scenes. That was quite a long answer for part one. Um, I I would suggest that you shorten that a little, but uh, I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to focus on with my answer, so perhaps that was a little longer than I should have done. Let's move to the next part one question. Is art popular in your country? I I live in Korea, so I'm going to talk about Korea, and it is art is popular in Korea. Definitely. We have several uh art museums. There's always exhibitions on and there's a nice district in the north of Seoul where there are a lot of art galleries. Um, you can see different sculptures and paintings, various things, uh up there. So, I would say art is really popular in Korea. Okay, that was a better answer, a bit more concise. I I felt happier about that one. Today we're going to skip part two. I'm going to go straight on to part three. Sometimes I'll do a part two using my structure, but I will go straight to part three and um we'll go with the this question. How can children benefit from learning art?
[3:17]I think children can really benefit from learning art by simply doing a lot of art and the repetition of it. Uh, they can really improve their creativity. I think creativity is something we can learn. We are born with it to a certain extent, but it is something we can improve like any skill. So I think children can really benefit from an early age experiencing painting, uh making sculptures, or simply just pencil drawings. And getting good feedback from teachers rather than being told some things are wrong, some things are right, getting feedback that really encourages creativity is very important. The next question. Why do you think some people enjoy looking at paintings and sculptures and others do not? I think some people enjoy it, uh because they can they can understand the meaning or they like interpreting the meaning of paintings or sculptures. The artists always try to portray something, um could be portraying someone or something. And that's not always easy to understand. Whereas some people really want to directly understand what they're seeing. For example, a photograph, some people like to have a bit of flexibility to interpret it in the way they want. Let's do one more and then we'll wrap up today's episode. How has art changed in the last few decades in your country? Is hard to say for me as someone who doesn't like art, but what I notice nowadays is there's a lot of realism, uh which is shown on social media. They show the process of actually uh painting or making whatever it is, whatever type of art it is. So I'd say one of the big changes is social media and actually showing the process rather than just showing the final piece. Another thing I notice is there's a lot of uh graffiti or sort of street art where people are painting or drawing on walls. Um I can't remember the name of the artist who's a good example of that. But uh there's a lot of artists who who do that and and it's become very popular again with the help of social media. Okay, just a little thought on that last answer. Uh, remember very often they will ask you, how has X, how has blank changed in the last few decades? How has blank changed in the last few years? Just remember is very, it's a very common question and very often you can mention technology or social media. That's like a go-to answer. Try to make that a habit for yourself. Uh, it's changed everything, right? That's that's the reality. So, that's an kind of a cheat for this kind of question. Just always mention social media or technology. Okay, that wraps up today's topic, which was art. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll be back very soon with our next topic. Let's see if I can tell you books is one of my favorite topics again. Okay, thanks, and have a wonderful week. Bye-bye.
