IELTS vocabulary: Health

Health is one of the most reliably tested Task 2 topics, covering diet, chronic disease, mental health, and the structure of healthcare systems, and it also surfaces constantly in Part 3 discussions that follow Part 2 cue cards about exercise, food, or a memorable illness. The recurring weakness in weaker answers isn't a lack of engagement with the topic — most candidates have genuine opinions about health — it's that those opinions get expressed through only two words, "healthy" and "unhealthy," doing duty for a dozen more specific ideas about causes, systems, and outcomes. This article separates the vocabulary an essay actually needs: lifestyle and causes, healthcare systems, public health measures, mental health specifically, and the confusable pairs that cost marks even in otherwise strong essays.

Vocabulary for lifestyle causes lets an essay name a mechanism instead of simply asserting that something is bad for you. "Sedentary lifestyle" describes a pattern of life involving very little physical activity, increasingly common in office-based and screen-based work. "Processed food" is food significantly altered from its natural state, often with added sugar, salt, or preservatives, and is distinct from "ultra-processed food," a stronger term for products assembled largely from industrial ingredients rather than minimally altered whole foods — a distinction worth making in essays about diet-related disease, since the two categories carry meaningfully different health implications. "Lifestyle-related illness" is a useful umbrella term for conditions substantially influenced by diet, activity, and habits (type 2 diabetes, some cardiovascular disease) as opposed to conditions with primarily genetic or infectious causes. "Chronic illness" is a long-lasting health condition requiring ongoing management, distinct from "acute illness," which is sudden in onset and typically short in duration — a pairing worth using precisely rather than defaulting to "sick" for both.

Vocabulary for healthcare systems moves an essay from personal behaviour to structural policy, which is where many Task 2 prompts about health actually want the argument to land. "Universal healthcare" describes a system in which all citizens have guaranteed access to medical care, typically funded through taxation, as opposed to a system relying primarily on private insurance. "Preventive care" is medical care aimed at avoiding illness before it develops — vaccination, screening, lifestyle counselling — while "curative care" or "reactive treatment" addresses illness only once it has already occurred; essays arguing that health systems are structured around the wrong half of this pair are making a genuinely strong, specific point. "Health inequality" and "healthcare accessibility" are related but distinct too: accessibility concerns only the practical ease of reaching and affording care, while health inequality is the broader, resulting gap in outcomes that accessibility, diet, environment, and other factors together produce — treating the two as identical understates how many other forces shape unequal health outcomes. "Healthcare rationing" (the deliberate limiting of available treatment due to resource constraints) and "out-of-pocket costs" (expenses a patient pays directly, not covered by insurance or the state) are both precise terms for discussing why access to healthcare varies even within a single system.