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IELTS Speaking — Practice Test 9

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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.

Childhood memories
What's one of your earliest memories — the kind that comes back to you clearly?
Was there a game or activity you never got tired of as a child?
Why do you think some childhood moments stay vivid while whole years disappear?
Is the place where you grew up very different now from how you remember it?
Do you think children today will look back on their childhoods the way you look back on yours?
Meeting friends and social habits
When you meet up with friends, what do you usually end up doing?
Do you tend to plan get-togethers in advance, or do they just happen?
Why do you think some friendships survive long gaps without meeting, and others fade?
Did you see your friends more often a few years ago than you do now?
Do you think people your age will still meet face to face as much in the future, or will most of it move online?

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 skill you would like to develop.

You should say:

  • what the skill is
  • how you first became interested in it
  • what you would need to do to learn it
  • how difficult it would be for you

and explain why you want to develop this skill and what difference it would make to your life.

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

Examiner follow-up
Have you actually taken any first steps yet?
Do you know anyone who's really good at this?
Is this something you'd want to be taught, or would you rather figure it out alone?

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.

Employers often say they care more about skills than certificates, yet they still ask for degrees. Why is that?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Is a certificate really evidence of a skill?
  • Do you see this changing in any industry you know?
What kinds of skills, if any, do you think machines will never do better than people?
Examiner follow-ups
  • What is it about those skills that resists automation?
  • Are you confident about that, or just hopeful?
When technology makes someone's job obsolete, whose responsibility is the retraining — the person's, the employer's, or the government's?
Examiner follow-ups
  • What happens when none of the three steps up?
  • Does the answer depend on how the job was lost?
Is it genuinely harder to learn a new skill at fifty than at fifteen, or is that mostly an excuse?
Examiner follow-ups
  • What advantages might an older learner actually have?
  • Where do you think the belief comes from?
Why do you think adults abandon new skills so much more quickly than children do?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Is it about time, fear, or something else?
  • What would make an adult stick with something they're bad at?
Schools teach a fixed set of subjects, but the skills the economy wants keep changing. How should education systems deal with that mismatch?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Is 'learning how to learn' a real skill or just a slogan?
  • Who should decide what gets taught?
When someone turns a hobby into a profession, what do they gain and what do they lose?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Have you seen this happen to anyone?
  • Would you take that trade yourself?
Social media is full of people selling courses that promise a new skill in thirty days. What does the popularity of these promises tell us?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Why are shortcuts so appealing even when we suspect they don't work?
  • Is any of that industry actually useful?
Some people collect beginner-level skills; others spend decades mastering one thing. Which approach serves a person better over a lifetime?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Does the modern economy favour one over the other?
  • Can a society have too many generalists?
If machines end up doing most economically useful work, what would be the point of humans learning skills at all?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Is usefulness the only reason we learn things?
  • How might societies have to rethink what a 'valuable' skill is?

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

  • Talks about a skill they don't yet have without running dry — the trick is describing the wanting, the plan and the obstacle, not just naming the skill.
  • Keeps hypothetical ground steady in Part 2: what learning it would involve, how life would change — sustained future-and-conditional talk without stalling.
  • In Part 3, moves from personal learning stories to how societies handle skills without the shift sounding like a gear crunch.
  • Extends answers unprompted with reasons and consequences; the examiner's follow-up prompts should mostly go unused.
  • Hesitates to think, not to translate — "give me a second, that's a big one" followed by a fluent answer costs nothing.

Lexical Resource

  • Learning vocabulary with precision: pick something up, get the hang of, plateau, rusty, self-taught, muscle memory, steep learning curve.
  • Work-and-skills vocabulary for Part 3: retraining, obsolete, apprenticeship, credentials, transferable skills, upskilling used naturally, not as buzzword confetti.
  • Natural collocations — "put in the hours", "start from scratch", "a gift for languages" — rather than invented pairings.
  • Paraphrases around gaps smoothly ("the person who checks your certificates — the examiner, I suppose") instead of freezing.
  • Separates near-synonyms cleanly: skill vs talent vs qualification; learn vs master; hobby vs pastime vs side hustle.

Grammatical Range & Accuracy

  • Handles the cue card's built-in unreality: "I'd have to practise daily", "it would take me years", "if I'd started as a child, it would be second nature by now."
  • Future forms varied and accurate in predictions: "machines are likely to…", "I can see a time when…", "that's bound to change."
  • Concessives for the balanced Part 3 questions: "Even though a degree proves persistence, it says little about…".
  • Gerund and infinitive patterns solid across learning verbs: enjoy practising, manage to improve, worth persevering with, keen to master.
  • Complex sentences resolve properly; errors are rare, minor, and often self-corrected on the fly.

Pronunciation

  • Clearly intelligible throughout; enthusiasm about the chosen skill comes through in pitch range, not just adjectives.
  • Contrastive stress carries the argument: "it's not the money, it's the freedom"; "machines can copy the notes, not the nerve."
  • Connected speech natural on high-frequency chunks: "want_to", "would_have_to", "sort_of" — without collapsing into mumbling.
  • Multi-syllable topic words — qualification, apprenticeship, obsolete, autonomous — stressed correctly.
  • Rhythm distinguishes reflection from assertion; the voice doesn't flatline during abstract Part 3 answers.

How to develop a Band 9 answer for this test

Part 1. Answer directly, then add a reason or a small true detail — two to four sentences. For "Was there a game you never got tired of as a child?" a Band 9 answer is specific and slightly imperfect: "Cricket in the lane behind our house, with a brick for a wicket. We must have played the same match a thousand times and argued about the same run-out every single evening." The detail proves the memory is real; a generic "I liked playing outdoor games" proves nothing.
Part 2 — two-minute planning framework.
  1. Name it fast — say what the skill is in the first sentence ("I'd love to be able to swim properly — embarrassingly, I still can't"), so the rest of the time builds rather than delays.
  2. Origin of the wish — tell the small story of where the wanting started: the person you watched, the moment you felt the gap, the trip where it mattered.
  3. The plan — describe concretely what learning it would involve: lessons, practice hours, equipment, a teacher or an app, and roughly how long you'd give it.
  4. The obstacle — be honest about the difficulty bullet: what's stopped you so far, whether it's time, fear, money or plain laziness; honesty here reads as fluency, not weakness.
  5. The payoff — paint one specific scene of life after the skill: the conversation you could have in another language, the song played at a family dinner, the sea holiday transformed.
  6. Close on the why — answer the explain line in one or two direct sentences: what the skill would change, and why that change matters to you more than the effort it costs.
Part 3 — Answer → Explain → Example → Alternative View → Evaluation

“When technology makes someone's job obsolete, whose responsibility is the retraining — the person's, the employer's, or the government's?”

  1. Answer: take a position with shape — e.g. it's shared, but the shares aren't equal: the government builds the ladder, the employer pays for part of it, the individual has to climb.
  2. Explain: give the reasoning — individuals can't fund retraining from a salary that just vanished, and employers have no incentive to train people who may leave, so unmanaged, the cost falls on whoever can least carry it.
  3. Example: one concrete illustration — countries that fund mid-career retraining, the way Singapore's SkillsFuture credits work, versus places where a closed factory simply becomes a long-term unemployment statistic.
  4. Alternative view: concede honestly — there's a real argument that guaranteed retraining makes people passive, and that the sharpest workers reinvent themselves without waiting for a programme.
  5. Evaluate: land it — but building policy for the sharpest ten percent abandons the rest, so I'd say the state carries the floor and individuals carry the ambition.

Common mistakes for this specific test

⚠️ Describing a skill you already have

The cue card is about a skill you would like to develop. Candidates drift into a proud account of their guitar playing — and every bullet about learning it, the difficulty and the future difference stops making sense.

⚠️ Choosing 'English' as the skill

It's the reflex choice, it's what the whole exam already tests, and it invites recycled classroom phrases. Swimming, driving, cooking for twenty people, video editing — anything concrete gives you fresher material.

⚠️ Ignoring the difficulty bullet

"It would be easy because I am very motivated" wastes the most interesting bullet. The honest version — what has actually stopped you so far — produces exactly the natural, specific speech examiners reward.

⚠️ Childhood answers with no actual memory

"My childhood was very happy and memorable" is a verdict, not a memory. One brick-for-a-wicket detail outscores a paragraph of adjectives.

⚠️ Buzzword salad on the future-of-work questions

Stacking 'upskilling, reskilling, disruption, automation' without a concrete claim reads as memorised LinkedIn language. One clear example — bank tellers and ATMs, say — beats all four words.

⚠️ Answering 'whose responsibility' with 'everyone'

"The individual, the company and the government should all work together" is a non-answer. Band 8–9 responses divide the labour: who pays, who provides, who shows up.

⚠️ Treating the hobby-to-profession question as purely positive

"Doing what you love means never working a day" is a fridge magnet. The question explicitly asks what's gained and lost — the lost half (deadlines eating the joy, income pressure) is where the interesting answer lives.

⚠️ Prepared 'lifelong learning is important' speech

Part 3 here keeps circling learning, and memorised essays surface fast. The questions are specific — age, responsibility, generalists versus specialists — and a generic homage to learning answers none of them.

⚠️ Only 'will' for every prediction

"People will meet online. Machines will do the jobs." Future talk dominates this test; vary it — 'is likely to', 'I can see X happening', 'that's bound to', 'I doubt we'll ever' — or the grammar score flatlines.

⚠️ Rushing the explain line

The last part of the cue card — why you want it and what difference it would make — is the emotional core, and candidates routinely leave it for the final ten seconds. Plan to spend a full third of your two minutes there.

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