Discuss cities and social structure with terms that name specific pressures, and understand why the two topics travel together in IELTS prompts.
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Urbanisation and inequality arrive in the same prompts because a city is where a social problem becomes a physical one.
IELTS prompts pair cities with social questions constantly — housing with inequality, transport with access, migration with cohesion. That is not coincidence.
A city is where an abstract social pressure becomes a physical one. Inequality in a country is a statistic; inequality in a city is two streets with different life expectancies. That is why the vocabulary of one is the vocabulary of the other.
A single city map with each term labelling the pressure it names.
Build more, or share better. Naming which one decides your whole solution paragraph.
Each pressure produces a particular consequence. Match them up.
Terms
Definitions
Three decisions about whether building more would actually help.
One
The situation: the city has plenty of empty flats, but nurses and teachers cannot afford any of them.
Candidates: a housing shortage / a shortage of affordable housing
The expert chooses:
Because:
Two
What you mean: people moving from the countryside into cities, described neutrally.
Candidates: urban sprawl / rural-to-urban migration
The expert chooses:
Because:
Three
What you mean: wealthier residents arriving in a poor district, and you want to stay neutral about whether this is good.
Candidates: gentrification / regeneration
The expert chooses:
Because:
Six gaps across a Task 2 paragraph, sorting supply problems from distribution ones.
How should cities respond to rapid population growth?
Growth creates two different kinds of problem, and the same solution will not address both.
Sustained rural-to-urban concentrates population faster than housing can be built, and cities typically respond by expanding outward — producing the low-density that makes every subsequent service more expensive to deliver.
The visible consequence is on roads never designed for the volume, which sustained investment in can genuinely ease.
Developers also tend to build homes without the parks, clinics and shops that make a district liveable, leaving new residents to travel for basic .
But the hardest problem is not one of supply. A city may have empty homes and still lack , because price rather than quantity determines who can live there.
Where that persists, between districts hardens, and the shared trust that holds a city together — its — weakens with it.
Propose a solution and find out whether it matches the kind of problem you named.
Task 2 prompt: Many cities are becoming unaffordable for the people who work in them. What can be done?
If you name a distribution problem and then propose building more, the two sentences do not connect — and that mismatch is what this sprint is testing.
One problem named precisely, one matching solution.
Then check your solution actually addresses that kind.