Phrasal verbs: gambling

This ESL worksheet helps learners understand, recognise, and confidently use common English phrasal verbs connected with gambling, risk, money, and decision-making. Through realistic contexts, students learn how to discuss betting, winning, losing, addiction, financial consequences, and making sensible choices using natural phrasal verbs that are widely used in everyday spoken and written English.

Activities Overview

Students begin by reading a dialogue featuring phrasal verbs such as bet on, get hooked on, cash in, burn through, walk away, gamble away, and double down. They then match each phrasal verb to its definition, helping them understand meaning and usage in context.

Next, learners complete gap-fill exercises by choosing the correct phrasal verb in the appropriate form. They then discuss questions about gambling, risk-taking, and money, encouraging them to use the target phrasal verbs in meaningful conversations before moving on to a sentence-completion task where they use the target expressions to personalise their answers and practise speaking.

Students then read a second set of dialogues featuring pay off, rake in, run up, suck in, bail out, give in, spiral into, and pay up. After matching these phrasal verbs to their definitions, learners complete multiple-choice exercises to reinforce meaning, form, and context.

The lesson continues with a sentence transformation activity in which students replace highlighted expressions with suitable phrasal verbs. This helps reinforce collocations and encourages learners to recognise when phrasal verbs sound more natural than single-word alternatives.

Finally, students engage in a discussion using the phrasal verbs, and discuss how risky different situations are, and why, using a suitable phrasal verb in their answers.

For additional speaking practice, you can use the printable conversation cards.