Increase, decrease, rise and fall

Here’s some vocabulary that may be useful for your IELTS Academic Writing task 1. It’s taken from the example answer I wrote in my post ‘IELTS Academic Writing task 1: what information should you include‘.

I’ve included the sentences or phrases that I used the vocabulary in to give you an example of how you can use the words.

Increase / Rise:

…the world consumption of oil, coal, gas, nuclear energy and hydropower increased from 1965 to 2005…
The largest increases were seen in the consumption of fossil fuels.
The amount of gas the world consumed rose from less than 1 terawatt to over 3 during the same period.
…this general trend of rising consumption…

Decrease / Fall:

…the consumption of one or more of these sources of energy decreased…
…the consumption of oil fell by approximately 0.5 terawatts.

As you can see, ‘increase’ can be used as a verb (…hydropower increased…) or a noun (…the largest increases were seen…). If you check in a dictionary, you’ll also see that the words ‘decrease’, ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ can be used with these two forms as well.

If you want to improve your use of vocabulary in your writing, it’s important to notice how particular words are used in texts that you’ve read.

For now, have a look at the different ways I used the word ‘consumption‘ in the example answer I mentioned above; I’m suggesting you look at this word because it’s a word on the Academic Word List.

Pete

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