Reduce or Decrease
Part 1 of the academic IELTS writing test often contains graphs. It requires you to describe what you see, explain changes, make comparisons and use the data.
The problem is that there is a lot of information to describe and you must avoid repeating words. For instance, a band 4 student probably knows ‘goes up’, ‘goes down’, ‘increase’, ‘decrease’ and maybe some other basic words for describing change. So after 4 sentences, they have no more words to use and will repeat. In the IELTS writing test, repetition shows that your English is LIMITED. That means you are not above band 5.
The key to getting a better vocabulary score is to learn and use more words, especially verbs, BUT you have to know how to use them correctly. Here are 2 verbs for describing change that many students confuse:
reduce and decrease
People often think that these two verbs are the same and are therefore interchangeable, so they will write:
The number of students decreased/reduced from 1000 to 800.
This is not correct. We use ‘reduction’ more for an action that we do. For instance, you can reduce the temperature in your house or reduce the volume on your phone. You would not say that they reduced themselves.
In comparison, you can say that the WIFI signal decreased or the number of your friend’s tweets decreased last week.
Here are some more examples:
Tourist numbers decreased during the summer. (they decreased by themselves)
The university reduced the number of courses on offer. (they were reduced by the university)
So, in the IELTS writing test, use the verbs decrease and reduce correctly and also remember to use their noun forms for additional variation. For example:
The government reducedpublic spending by 15% in 2003.
There was a 25% reduction in the number of train journeys last year.
Household income decreased every year.
February saw a decrease in the amount of spending on food.
