IELTS often requires us to talk about money and how we spend it, so here’s a song illustrating some common collocations. Lyrics are embedded in the video.
The price of natural pearls is more expensive than the price of man made pearls.
This is an Indonesian student translating ‘harganya mahal‘!
First of all ‘price‘ can be ‘high‘ or ‘low‘:
- The price of natural pearls is higher than the price of man made pearls.
Products and services, meanwhile, can be ‘cheap’ or ‘expensive’:
- Natural pearls are more expensive than man made pearls.
We can use the same collocation to talk about this bottle of wine:
- Penfolds Grange Hermitage 1951 is very expensive. Only a rich person can afford to pay such a high price for wine!
If you say the price is expensive, strictly speaking you are saying that a sequence of numbers (in this case $38,420) is expensive! The wine is expensive, not the numbers!
(See IELTS public band descriptors)
Because of the recent increase in fuel prices, the price of food is more expensive than before.
This is obviously a direct translation of harganya lebih mahal!
This is really a collocation problem. The IELTS examiner will understand what you mean, but you will not receive a good score for vocabulary. A product or service can be expensive, but the price of the product or service is either high or low.
More correct collocation is as follows:
- Because of the recent increase in fuel prices, the price of food is higher than before.
- Because of the recent increase in fuel prices, food is more expensive than before.
Meanwhile here’s a song illustrating some common collocations when talking about money.