2. Using stress effectively - Sentence stress

Sentence stress is the music of spoken English. Like word stress, sentence stress can help you understand spoken English. Sentence stress, which gives English its rhythm, is accent on certain words within a sentence.

Listen to Alex Li's introduction and focus on the words in bold (the ones that are stressed)



Hi, I'm Alex  and over the next two minutes, I'm going to share my passion and explain why I'd love to be a part  of the Global solutions programme.

So what excites me to get out of bed in the morning?

well, the short answer is  empowering others be it a young person in school / or an entrepreneur living in poverty.

Over the past few years, I've been pursuing this passion in two main ways.


You notice that the words that are stressed are content words. Content words are the key words of a sentence. They are the important words that carry the meaning or sense—the real content.