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IELTS Speaking — Practice Test 3

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Part 1 — Introduction and interview (4–5 minutes)

Answer each question aloud in 2–4 natural sentences. Press 🔊 to hear the examiner ask it. Don't script — react.

Weekends and free time
When Saturday morning arrives, what do you find yourself wanting to do first?
Do your weekends tend to follow a pattern, or does each one look different?
Some people plan their free time carefully and others leave it completely open — which are you, and why?
Are your weekends anything like the ones you had five or ten years ago?
Do you think people in your country will have more free time in the future, or less?
Online communication
When you want to reach a close friend, do you call, message, or something else?
Are there people you only ever talk to online these days?
Why do you think some conversations feel easier in writing than face to face?
Has the way your family stays in touch changed since you were younger?
Do you ever decide to put your phone away and be unreachable for a while? How does that go?

Part 2 — Individual long turn (3–4 minutes)

You have one minute to prepare (make notes!) and should then speak for one to two minutes. Use the timers — the discipline is the practice.

Describe a difficult decision you made that you are glad you took.

You should say:

  • what the decision was
  • what made it so difficult at the time
  • how you finally made up your mind
  • what happened as a result

and explain why you are glad you took it, and whether you would decide the same way again today.

You will have one minute to prepare and should speak for one to two minutes.

Examiner follow-up
Did anyone try to talk you out of it?
How long did it take before you knew it was the right call?
Would you give someone facing the same choice any advice?

Part 3 — Two-way discussion (4–5 minutes)

These get harder as they go. Build answers with: Answer → Explain → Example → Alternative view → Evaluation. Open the follow-ups only after you've answered — that's what the examiner asks when an answer is thin.

When people face a big decision, what do they actually rely on — logic, feelings, or something else?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Does what they SAY they rely on match what they actually do?
  • Does it depend on the kind of decision?
Why do people ask others for advice and then ignore it?
Examiner follow-ups
  • What are they really looking for when they ask, then?
  • Is there anyone whose advice people almost never ignore?
Some say that having endless options makes choosing harder, not easier. What's your experience of that?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Where do you see this most — shopping, careers, entertainment?
  • How do people cope with it?
How differently do a twenty-year-old and a sixty-year-old approach the same big decision?
Examiner follow-ups
  • What does each of them have that the other lacks?
  • Whose approach tends to produce better outcomes, in your view?
Do people regret the risky decisions they took more, or the safe ones?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Why might that be?
  • Does knowing this actually change how anyone decides?
In your country, how much say do families have in a young person's major life decisions — and is that changing?
Examiner follow-ups
  • What's gained and what's lost as that changes?
  • Where should the line be, ideally?
Employers, schools and governments increasingly make choices on people's behalf — default pension schemes, set curricula, health rules. When is it right for an institution to decide for you?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Where does helpful guidance end and control begin?
  • Who should be accountable when a default choice turns out badly?
Algorithms now recommend what we watch, buy, read, even who we date. At what point does a recommendation stop being help and start being a decision made for us?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Does it matter, if the outcomes are good?
  • Should people be told how these suggestions are produced?
Is decisiveness overrated? Some cultures prize leaders who choose fast and never look back, while slow deliberation gets called weakness.
Examiner follow-ups
  • Can you think of a situation where hesitation is actually the braver option?
  • How could a society reward careful deciding rather than just fast deciding?
If a machine could genuinely make better major decisions for you — career, city, partner — than you make yourself, should you let it?
Examiner follow-ups
  • What exactly would be lost, if the results are better?
  • Would your answer change for medical decisions?

What a Band 8–9 performance should demonstrate

Judge your recording against the four official criteria. An accent is not required — clarity is.

Fluency & Coherence

  • Tells the decision story with its tension intact — the listener should feel the fork in the road before hearing which path was taken.
  • Uses time-and-turning-point markers naturally ("for weeks I went back and forth", "then one evening it just settled") rather than 'firstly, secondly'.
  • Keeps the thread through the two-part explain line — why you're glad AND whether you'd choose the same today — without being reminded.
  • In Part 3, thinks aloud fluently on questions with no rehearsed answer ("regret risky or safe decisions?") instead of freezing or reciting.
  • Handles the hypothetical machine-decision question at the end with sustained speech — the hardest question should not produce the shortest answer.

Lexical Resource

  • Precise decision vocabulary: weigh up, dilemma, trade-off, second-guess, gut feeling, deliberate (as a verb), commit to, live with the consequences.
  • Natural collocations — "torn between", "a leap in the dark", "in hindsight", "it paid off", "no turning back" — placed where they genuinely fit.
  • Distinguishes the near-synonyms this topic runs on: choice vs decision, regret vs remorse, cautious vs indecisive, brave vs reckless.
  • Part 1 stays conversational and specific: a lie-in, catching up with people, going off-grid for a weekend — not 'doing various activities'.
  • Part 3 register rises cleanly to abstraction: autonomy, paternalism, defaults, accountability, deliberation — without drowning the answer in jargon.

Grammatical Range & Accuracy

  • Past narrative machinery is solid in Part 2: past perfect for the situation before ("I had been offered…"), past simple for the choice, present perfect for its results since.
  • Third conditionals carry the reflection: "If I'd listened to everyone else, I would still be…" — this cue card practically demands them.
  • Modality is graded accurately in Part 3: 'institutions may need to', 'people should arguably', 'a machine might well' — not one-size-fits-all 'should'.
  • Concessives structure balanced answers: "However much data an algorithm has, …", "Even when the advice is sound, …".
  • Indirect questions stay untangled: "what people are really asking is whether they'll regret it" — no double-question-word pile-ups.

Pronunciation

  • Clearly intelligible throughout — the priority is word endings on the tense-heavy verbs: decided, offered, would've, hadn't.
  • Contrastive stress carries the story's logic: "Everyone told me to stay — I LEFT."
  • Weak forms keep conditionals fluent: 'would have been' compresses naturally rather than arriving as three equal words.
  • Multi-syllable topic words — deliberately, alternative, responsibility, algorithm — stressed on the right syllable.
  • Pace drops slightly, deliberately, on the reflective questions; a thoughtful slowdown reads as control, not hesitation.

How to develop a Band 9 answer for this test

Part 1. Answer in two to four sentences: a direct answer, then a reason or small true detail. For "Do your weekends tend to follow a pattern?" a Band 9 answer commits and illustrates ("Embarrassingly, yes — Saturday is errands and a long walk, Sunday is cooking for the week. If the pattern breaks, I actually feel it on Monday") rather than hedging with "It depends on my mood." Respond to the question you were asked; save the philosophy for Part 3.
Part 2 — two-minute planning framework.
  1. Set the fork — one or two sentences stating the decision as a genuine either/or, so the listener knows exactly what was at stake before the story moves.
  2. Weight of the choice — what made it difficult: what you stood to lose on each side, who else it affected, and what the safer option was whispering.
  3. The deciding moment — how you finally made up your mind: a conversation, a deadline, a sleepless night, a list that didn't help. One concrete scene beats a summary.
  4. Immediate aftermath — the first results, including anything that went wrong early; a Band 9 story doesn't pretend the payoff was instant.
  5. Why you're glad — connect the outcome to something larger than luck: what it taught you, what it opened up, who you became by choosing it.
  6. The 'again today?' verdict — answer the card's final question explicitly, with a reason: same choice, or same choice but made differently, or honestly no.
Part 3 — Answer → Explain → Example → Alternative View → Evaluation

“Why do people ask others for advice and then ignore it?”

  1. Answer: take a clear position — e.g. most advice-seeking isn't information-gathering at all; it's rehearsal and reassurance.
  2. Explain: give the mechanism — saying the dilemma out loud organises it, and watching your own reaction to the advice reveals what you'd already decided underneath.
  3. Example: one concrete illustration — someone canvassing five friends about leaving a job and 'ignoring' four of them: they weren't polling, they were listening for the answer that matched their gut.
  4. Alternative view: concede genuinely — sometimes ignoring advice is simply overconfidence, and in technical matters (legal, medical, financial) discounting expertise carries a real price.
  5. Evaluate: land the judgement — so the habit is less irrational than it looks: advice works as a mirror more than a map, which is also why the best advisers mostly ask questions.

Common mistakes for this specific test

⚠️ Choosing a decision with no real cost

"I decided to study English harder" was never difficult, and the examiner can hear it. The card needs a fork with genuine loss on the rejected side — a move, a course dropped, a job refused — or the 'difficult' bullet has nothing to work with.

⚠️ Narrating the outcome and skipping the deciding

The third bullet — how you finally made up your mind — is the heart of the card, and most candidates jump straight from 'it was hard' to 'it worked out'. The messy middle is where the marks are.

⚠️ Pretending there was never any doubt

A story in which you were always sure undercuts the word 'difficult' and flattens the language. Admitting you nearly chose otherwise sets up the third conditionals that Band 8–9 grammar feeds on.

⚠️ Answering 'would you decide the same again?' with just 'yes'

The card's final question is an invitation to reflect, not a checkbox. One sentence on what today-you knows that then-you didn't is the easiest depth available in the whole test.

⚠️ Turning Part 1 free-time answers into a CV

"In my free time I improve my skills and read self-development books" sounds performed. Examiners rate natural language, not virtue — a lie-in and a cricket match, truthfully described, score better.

⚠️ Giving the algorithm question a memorised technology speech

The question is about where recommendation ends and decision begins — a boundary question. Reciting advantages and disadvantages of social media misses it entirely.

⚠️ Only personal examples in Part 3

"When I chose my college…" is Part 2 material. Part 3 wants patterns — 'people my age tend to', 'in most families here' — with your own case as a brief illustration at most.

⚠️ Wearing out the word 'decision'

It will appear in half the questions; it shouldn't appear in half your sentences. Rotate: choice, call, dilemma, crossroads, make up my mind, commit, settle on, go through with.

⚠️ Refusing to land on the hard hypotheticals

"Should you let a machine decide for you?" answered with an endless 'on the one hand' loop is a Band 6 pattern. Pick a side, concede the strongest objection, and still land the verdict.

⚠️ Speeding up when the questions turn abstract

The institutional and machine-decision questions push nervous candidates into a sprint, and pronunciation collapses first. Slowing slightly and thinking aloud reads as depth, not weakness.

Try another test Pronunciation practice (Spoken English)