Start here · the long version
What trends over time really asks you to write
Trend language reports three separate things about a change: which way it went, how large it was, and how quickly it happened. Most errors come from using one word to do two of those jobs.
Three questions, three sets of words
A line on a graph carries three pieces of information and English has a different word class for each. The verb carries direction: something rose or it fell. An adverb of degree carries size: sharply, slightly, marginally. An adverb of manner carries speed and shape: gradually, steadily, abruptly. Keeping them apart is most of what this vocabulary asks of you, and collapsing them is the commonest error in Task 1.
“Rose rapidly” and “rose sharply” are not synonyms and are not interchangeable. The first says it happened quickly; the second says it went up a long way. A line can rise sharply over twenty years — a big change, slowly — and it can rise rapidly by very little. If you write one when you meant the other, the reader compares your sentence with the picture and finds them disagreeing.
The good news is that these words combine freely once you know which job each does. Two words — one verb and one adverb — describe most movements accurately, and a third is usually one too many.
Direction: the verb“rose”, “fell”, “climbed”, “declined”. This is the only one of the three you cannot omit.
Size: the degree adverb“sharply”, “markedly”, “slightly”, “marginally”. Says how far it moved, not how fast.
Speed and shape: the manner adverb“gradually”, “steadily”, “abruptly”. Says how it got there.
Noun form: the alternative“a sharp rise in”, “a gradual decline in”. Same content, different grammar — and the preposition is always “in”.
The prepositions, which is where it breaks
Trend verbs carry prepositions that are fixed and not guessable. Something rises *to* a value and rises *by* an amount, and confusing the two turns a rise of five points into a rise to five. It peaks *at* a figure, never “peaks to”. A rise happens *in* a category — “a rise in unemployment” — and the noun keeps that “in” even when the verb it came from took something else.
These are worth learning as whole phrases rather than as words, because each one is short and each one is the kind of error that a reader notices immediately: the sentence stops matching the chart.
What it costs you to skip this
Trend language is the most checkable vocabulary in the exam. Every word can be compared against the picture, so an inaccurate verb or a swapped preposition is not a stylistic slip — it makes the sentence report something the visual does not show, which reaches Task Achievement as well as Lexical Resource. And repeating “increase” eight times, which is what happens when this set is thin, is the clearest possible signal of limited range.
Where it stops applying
None of this belongs in the overview, where figures and precise movements are out of place. And a trend verb needs an actual trend: two data points are a change, not a trend, and describing a chart with two dated columns as “rising steadily” claims a shape the visual never drew. Strong verbs like “plummet” and “soar” also have a floor — used for a five per cent movement they read as exaggeration.
