Same Problem, Three Ways Worse
One crack, drawn three times — deeper, wider, and crumbling with nobody touching it.
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Two of these need someone to do them. The third happens by itself.
Describe deterioration precisely — making a problem worse is not the same as making it spread — and control the transitivity split that causes most errors here.
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A problem can get more severe, larger in scale, or simply decline on its own. Three different verbs.
Band 6 has one phrase — make worse — for three genuinely different things.
MORE SEVERE the same problem, intensified
exacerbate · aggravate
LARGER SCALE the problem spreads or grows in scope
escalate
DECLINING it gets worse on its own, no actor
deteriorate
The conflict escalated from a local dispute to a regional war.
→ grew in scale
The drought exacerbated existing food shortages.
→ made the same problem more severe
The building deteriorated over twenty years of neglect.
→ declined, with nobody doing it
Using escalate where you mean exacerbate claims the problem spread when it only deepened. That is a factual difference, not a stylistic one.
One crack, drawn three times — deeper, wider, and crumbling with nobody touching it.
Two of these need someone to do them. The third happens by itself.
Sort twelve verbs by whether something has to be doing it.
Sort each item into the correct category
Three decisions between a problem deepening and a problem widening.
One
What happened: a local dispute over water rights grew until it involved three neighbouring countries.
Candidates: exacerbated / escalated
The expert chooses:
Because:
Two
What happened: food shortages already existed. A drought then made those same shortages far more severe.
Candidates: escalated / exacerbated
The expert chooses:
Because:
Three
What happened: over twenty years of neglect, a building got steadily worse. Nobody did anything to it.
Candidates: was deteriorated / deteriorated
The expert chooses:
Because:
Six gaps across a Task 2 problem paragraph. Two of them test transitivity.
The pressure on urban healthcare systems
Hospitals in many large cities are struggling, and the causes have compounded one another over two decades.
An ageing population health services in a way that was entirely predictable but rarely planned for.
Rapid migration into cities has systems that were designed for far smaller populations — they are under pressure, though they have not yet failed.
The 2020 pandemic shortages that already existed, making the same staffing gaps far more severe than before.
With no additional funding, conditions in the worst-affected hospitals steadily over the following three years, with nobody making any decision to allow it.
What began as a local staffing problem has since into a national political crisis.
There is broad agreement that chronic understaffing patient safety, and some evidence that it the long-term health of staff themselves.
Write two sentences about a problem getting worse, and have the transitivity and frames checked.
Task 2 topic: traffic congestion in fast-growing cities.
That contrast is the point. Getting it backwards produces a sentence that is not merely imprecise but grammatically impossible.
Two sentences. One with an actor, one without.
Name it, and name the verb.