hi everyone I'm Jenna and this is learn academic English
speaking of academic English today I'm going to give you a quick lesson about how to talk
about advantages and disadvantages this is a very common way of analyzing information so if
you're taking a class in school or if you have a job you might need to talk about advantages
and disadvantages about many different topics and today I'm going to give you two main tips
first when you are writing or speaking try not to repeat the same words over and over again
if you're talking about advantages you can also use the word benefits
benefits if you're talking about disadvantages you can also use the words drawbacks or downsides
so those are two words that have basically the same meaning as disadvantages so when you begin
your discussion of advantages you can use the word advantage a couple of times but then try
to use the word benefits at least once as well so that you're not repeating the same word over
and over again same thing with disadvantages you can start talking about disadvantages and then
you can add the words drawback or downside as you continue your discussion of disadvantages
second you need to know how to use these words in sentences and most importantly you
need to know what comes after these words in other words what are the collocations
Advantage we use advantage of something benefit we say benefit of something sometimes you can
hear the preposition 2 being used an advantage to something or a benefit to something let's look at
a couple of examples and in these examples we're going to be talking about hybrid cars
one advantage of owning a hybrid car instead of a gas powered car is higher fuel economy
a second benefit of hybrid cars is lower emissions
so emissions is that dirty stuff that comes out of the car notice that in both of these sentences
I used of after advantage or benefit how about disadvantage disadvantage like Advantage we use
the word of after but with downside and drawback we usually use too so for all of these we could
use of or to but disadvantage usually we say disadvantage of and downside or drawback we
usually use two and if you look them up in the dictionary those are the collocations that you're
going to find for example one disadvantage of owning a hybrid car is higher upfront cost so
that means that when an upfront cost is the cost that you pay at the beginning another drawback to
hybrid cars is the challenge of recycling the battery once it is no longer used hybrid cars
also have the following downsides higher upfront cost and the challenge of recycling the battery
the words pro and con we do use pros and cons to talk about advantages and disadvantages but
we usually use pros and cons together in the same sentence for example we might say there are many
pros and cons of owning a hybrid vehicle sometimes we might ask about pros and cons separately but
that would usually be more in conversation what are the pros of this approach and then we might
contrast it with the cons but typically pros and cons are used together so remember when
you're using these words in formal speaking or in writing you want to make sure that you
don't repeat the same word over and over again you can use the synonyms benefits or downsides
or drawbacks and you need to remember what word comes after with advantage and disadvantage pros
and cons we usually use of after but with drawbacks and downsides we usually use two
and because we have a preposition we need to follow that preposition with some kind of noun
that could be a noun or a noun phrase or a noun clause I hope this lesson helps you to know how
to use advantage and disadvantage if you have any questions please let me know and make sure
you check the description box below because I will leave a question that you can use to
practice this in the comments below if you found this video helpful please don't forget to give
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