PTE Word of the Week: ‘Mitigate’ and how to use it for a higher score

What it means

To mitigate something is to reduce how serious, painful or damaging it is, without necessarily removing it completely. You mitigate a risk, an effect, a consequence or damage. The noun is mitigation (“flood-mitigation measures”).

Why it scores in PTE

PTE's automated scorer rewards a precise, varied vocabulary and well-linked ideas: the Vocabulary and Written/Oral Discourse traits. A word like “mitigate” does more work than “reduce” or “make less bad”: it's exact, academic and natural in the cause-and-effect sentences essays and Describe Image answers are built on. Used correctly, it lifts your range without sounding forced. Our guide to linking words for PTE covers the connectors that support the same discourse trait.

Collocations to memorise

• mitigate the effects / impact of: “steps to mitigate the effects of climate change”
• mitigate the risk of: “regular testing mitigates the risk of failure”
• mitigate the damage / consequences
• measures / steps to mitigate
• help (to) mitigate: “trees help mitigate urban heat”

Example sentences

• Essay: “Governments can mitigate the impact of automation by funding large-scale retraining programmes.”
• Summarize Written Text: “The author argues that early intervention can mitigate the long-term effects of childhood stress.”
• Describe Image: “The chart suggests renewable energy could mitigate the steep rise in emissions after 2010.”
• Speaking (Re-tell Lecture): “The speaker explained how green roofs mitigate the urban heat-island effect.”

How to use it for a higher score

Reach for “mitigate” in any answer about problems and solutions in environment, technology, health or society. It fits the classic essay move: state a problem, then a measure that mitigates it. In speaking, it keeps you fluent because the collocations (“mitigate the effects of…”) come out as a single chunk, so you don't hesitate. See how a word like this fits a full essay model answer.

Common mistakes to avoid

• “mitigate against” is widely considered incorrect: you mitigate something, not against it. (If you mean “work against”, the word is militate against.)
• It means reduce, not eliminate, so don't write “mitigate the problem completely”.
• It's a verb. The noun is mitigation; there is no “a mitigate”.

Words in the same family

alleviate (ease suffering, as in alleviate poverty/pain), curb (limit, as in curb spending), lessen, offset (counterbalance) and ease. Rotate these so you're not repeating one word across an essay; variety is exactly what the Vocabulary trait rewards.

How Mitigate scores in PTE Academic 2026

Under the current PTE Academic scoring model, “mitigate” earns credit under the Vocabulary and Written Discourse traits only when it sits inside a full cause-and-effect clause. A bare noun phrase like “mitigate pollution” scores lower than a subject-verb-object sentence that names the agent, the action and the target, because the automated scorer weights syntactic completeness alongside lexical range.

Three collocation clusters worth practising in 2026, none of which we covered above:

• mitigate the burden on — useful for healthcare and housing essays: “subsidised childcare mitigates the burden on working parents”.
• mitigate exposure to — strong for environment and public-health prompts: “masks mitigate exposure to airborne pollutants”.
• mitigate the shortfall in — fits economics and skilled-migration prompts: “overseas recruitment mitigates the shortfall in registered nurses”.

Two upgraded example sentences you can adapt:

• Write Essay: “Congestion pricing, though politically unpopular, has been shown to mitigate peak-hour traffic without penalising low-income commuters when paired with transit subsidies.”
• Retell Lecture: “The lecturer argued that early childhood nutrition programmes mitigate the long-term cognitive effects of poverty more cost-effectively than school-age interventions.”

One honest caveat: Pearson's scoring engine flags responses whose content clusters too closely with common template phrasing. “This essay will discuss measures to mitigate the problem” is now so widely memorised that it contributes almost nothing to your Vocabulary score and can drag your Content trait if the rest of the paragraph does not actually name a measure. Use “mitigate” inside your own sentence, not as boilerplate.