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IELTS Speaking — Practice Test 14

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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.

Clothes and personal style
What kind of clothes do you feel most comfortable in?
Do you put much thought into what you wear on an ordinary day?
Is there an item of clothing you've kept for years and still wear? Why that one?
Do you dress differently now from the way you dressed five or six years ago?
Do you think you'll care more or less about clothes as you get older?
Weather and seasons
What's the weather usually like where you live at this time of year?
Do you check the weather forecast before you go out, or just take your chances?
Is there a season you always look forward to? What is it about it?
Does the weather change what you feel like doing — your mood, your plans?
Do people where you live talk about the weather much, or is it not really a topic?

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 tradition or celebration that matters in your family or your country.

You should say:

  • what the tradition or celebration is
  • when and how it usually happens
  • who takes part in it
  • how you personally are involved

and explain why this tradition matters, and whether you think it will still be around in thirty years.

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

Examiner follow-up
Has the way you celebrate it changed since you were a child?
Is this something younger people in your family still care about?
Would you keep this tradition going if you moved to another country?

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.

Why do you think some traditions survive for centuries while others quietly disappear within a generation?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Can you think of one from your country that's fading right now?
  • Is it the tradition itself that matters, or what it does for people?
Who actually keeps traditions alive in a family — is it usually one particular person?
Examiner follow-ups
  • What happens to those traditions when that person is gone?
  • Is that role chosen, or does someone just end up with it?
Do celebrations mean the same thing to the generation that started them and the generation that inherits them?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Does a tradition lose value if people forget why it began?
  • Can going through the motions still be worth something?
Globalisation puts the same films, food and festivals in front of everyone. Is that making local customs stronger or weaker?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Why might it make some communities hold on tighter?
  • Is this different in cities and in villages?
Many festivals have become heavily commercial — decorations in shops months in advance, gifts people feel obliged to buy. Does commercialisation damage a festival or actually help it survive?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Is there a point where the original meaning is lost completely?
  • Who benefits most from a festival becoming commercial?
Can a tradition that was invented recently — say, in the last twenty years — be as meaningful as an ancient one?
Examiner follow-ups
  • What would it take for a new ritual to feel 'real'?
  • Do people even know how old most of their traditions actually are?
Should governments spend public money protecting cultural practices, or should traditions be left to survive on their own merits?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Is a tradition kept alive by subsidy still a living tradition?
  • Where would you draw the line on what deserves protection?
Some traditions conflict with modern values — around gender roles, for instance, or animal welfare. How should a society decide which traditions to reform and which to defend?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Who should have the final say — the community that practises it, or society as a whole?
  • Can a tradition be changed and still be the same tradition?
When people migrate, they often celebrate their festivals more intensely abroad than they ever did at home. Why might that be?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Does a tradition change its meaning when it crosses a border?
  • What does that suggest about what traditions are really for?
Looking a few decades ahead, do you think shared traditions will matter more or less in societies where people increasingly live online?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Could purely digital rituals ever do the same job?
  • What would be lost if physical gatherings became rare?

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

  • Handles the jump from small talk about jumpers and monsoons to abstract questions about cultural survival without the fluency dropping.
  • The Part 2 story has a shape — sets the scene, walks through the celebration, lands on why it matters — instead of a list of foods and relatives.
  • Buys thinking time naturally on hard Part 3 questions ("That's a tricky one, because…") rather than with silence or 'um'.
  • Links ideas across the discussion: refers back to the family tradition from Part 2 when the examiner asks who keeps traditions alive.
  • Extends answers unprompted — the question about commercialisation gets a position, a reason and an example before the examiner needs a follow-up.

Lexical Resource

  • Topic vocabulary beyond 'tradition' and 'culture': ritual, heritage, hand down, die out, observe a custom, mark an occasion, a sense of belonging.
  • Natural collocations — "deeply rooted", "passed down through generations", "keep the tradition alive" — used where they fit, not sprinkled for show.
  • Can name specifics from their own culture and gloss them smoothly ("we make a sweet called…, which is basically…") instead of stalling on untranslatable words.
  • Register shifts cleanly: cosy and personal for the family celebration, measured and general for the question about government protection.
  • Paraphrases 'tradition' flexibly across ten Part 3 answers — custom, practice, ritual, institution — instead of wearing one word out.

Grammatical Range & Accuracy

  • Present habitual for the celebration ("every year we…", "the whole street gets involved") woven with past forms for how it used to be.
  • Future forms with genuine judgement in them: "I suspect it'll survive, but in a slimmed-down form", not just "it will continue".
  • Concession structures for the reform question: "Even though it's centuries old, that doesn't automatically make it worth keeping."
  • Passives where they're natural: "it's celebrated mainly in the north", "the recipes were handed down from my grandmother".
  • Hypotheticals in the migration and digital-ritual questions: "If I moved abroad, I'd probably celebrate it more, not less."

Pronunciation

  • Names of festivals, dishes and places from the candidate's culture are delivered confidently, then glossed — not mumbled apologetically.
  • Stress carries the argument in Part 3: "it's not the ritual that matters, it's the gathering" lands on the contrast.
  • Warm, varied intonation in the Part 2 story — a monotone description of a festival undercuts the claim that it matters.
  • Weak forms and linking keep long opinions flowing: "a lot of it comes down to…" as one run, not five separate words.
  • Multi-syllable abstractions — commercialisation, generation, heritage, ceremony — stressed correctly at speed.

How to develop a Band 9 answer for this test

Part 1. Answer the question asked, then add one concrete detail. For "Is there an item of clothing you've kept for years and still wear?" a Band 9 answer picks a real object and gives it a life: "A grey woollen shawl my grandmother gave me — it's fraying at one corner, but every winter it's the first thing out of the cupboard." One specific item with a reason beats a general speech about your wardrobe.
Part 2 — two-minute planning framework.
  1. Name it and place it — say what the tradition is and when it happens in one or two clean sentences, glossing any local terms immediately so the examiner is never lost.
  2. Paint one specific occasion — rather than describing the festival in general, take the listener to a particular year: the smells, the noise, who was crammed into which room.
  3. Show the mechanics — who does what: who cooks, who decorates, who always arrives late. Roles make the celebration real and cover the 'who takes part' bullet naturally.
  4. Locate yourself — your own job in the ritual, and how that role has changed as you've grown up; moving from watcher to organiser is a story in itself.
  5. Explain the weight — why it matters: not 'because it's our culture' but the actual function, whether that's the one day the whole family is in one place or a link to someone no longer there.
  6. Answer the thirty-year question head-on — commit to a view ("I think it'll survive, but shrink") and give one reason, so the cue card's final clause is explicitly closed.
Part 3 — Answer → Explain → Example → Alternative View → Evaluation

“Many festivals have become heavily commercial — decorations in shops months in advance, gifts people feel obliged to buy. Does commercialisation damage a festival or actually help it survive?”

  1. Answer: take a side with nuance built in — e.g. commercialisation is the price of survival: it keeps festivals visible, but hollows out what it touches.
  2. Explain: give the mechanism — shops and media amplify a festival because there's money in it, which keeps it in the calendar; but obligation replaces meaning when participation becomes shopping.
  3. Example: one concrete case — a festival from your country where the gift-giving arms race is recent, or how Diwali adverts now start six weeks early while fewer families make sweets at home.
  4. Alternative view: concede honestly — without the commercial machinery, some festivals would fade to a page in a textbook; visibility, even bought visibility, gives children something to inherit.
  5. Evaluate: land the judgement — commerce preserves the shell and the community has to keep supplying the substance; a festival dies not when it's commercialised but when nobody minds that it has been.

Common mistakes for this specific test

⚠️ Explaining the festival like an encyclopaedia entry

The cue card says 'matters in your family or your country' — the examiner wants your relationship with it, not a Wikipedia history. Candidates who lecture on origins for two minutes never reach the bullets about who takes part and how they're involved.

⚠️ Untranslatable words handled badly

Stopping dead at a local dish or ritual name ("it's called… I don't know in English…") costs fluency. Say the word confidently and gloss it in a clause — "rangoli, which is a coloured pattern we draw at the door" — and it becomes a lexical strength instead.

⚠️ Assuming the examiner knows the festival

"You know, like on Holi" with no explanation leaves a listener who may genuinely not know. Band 9 speakers calibrate: one line of context for anything culture-specific, then on with the story.

⚠️ The 'culture is our identity' non-answer

Part 3 questions here ask why traditions survive, who keeps them, whether governments should pay. Answering everything with variations of 'traditions are our identity and we must preserve them' is one recycled idea wearing five hats.

⚠️ Treating the reform question as a trap to escape

The question about traditions that conflict with modern values deserves a real position. Candidates who panic and retreat to 'every tradition is beautiful' dodge exactly the abstraction Band 8–9 requires.

⚠️ No stance on the thirty-year question

The explain-clause asks whether the tradition will still exist in thirty years. "Maybe yes, maybe no, who knows" wastes a ready-made chance to show future forms and reasoned speculation.

⚠️ Weather answers on autopilot

Part 1 weather questions get the most rehearsed answers in IELTS ("my country has four seasons…"). The questions here ask about your habits and mood — answer those, not the geography lesson you prepared.

⚠️ Repeating 'celebrate' and 'tradition' every sentence

The topic invites it. Rotate the language: observe, mark, gather for, keep up, hand down, ritual, custom, occasion — the range is exactly what Lexical Resource measures.

⚠️ Emotional monotone in Part 2

Describing a celebration you claim to love in a flat, recited voice sends contradictory signals. Pronunciation marks reward the natural rise and fall of someone genuinely reliving a good day.

⚠️ Only your own country in Part 3

Questions about globalisation and migration explicitly invite comparison. Staying entirely inside your own culture's examples narrows the discussion; one contrast — 'whereas in Japan, apparently…' — widens it instantly.

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