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IELTS Speaking — Practice Test 17

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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.

Sleep and rest
Are you the kind of person who needs a lot of sleep, or can you get by on very little?
What do you usually do in the last half hour before you go to bed?
Why do you think some people find it so hard to switch off at night?
Do you sleep better or worse now than you did when you were younger?
Do you think people in the future will sleep more than we do now, or less?
Noise and quiet
Would you describe the area where you live as a noisy place or a quiet one?
Is there a particular sound you hear every day that you've simply got used to?
Why do some people work better with background noise while others need complete silence?
Is your neighbourhood noisier than it was, say, five years ago?
Do you think cities will ever become quieter places to live?

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 quiet place you go when you want to think.

You should say:

  • where this place is
  • how often you go there
  • what you usually do there
  • why it is a good place for thinking

and explain how you feel when you leave this place, and what you would do if you could no longer go there.

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

Examiner follow-up
Do other people know about this place, or is it something you keep to yourself?
Do you ever take anyone with you?
Is it the silence itself that helps, or something else about the place?

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 people who live in noisy cities often say they no longer notice the noise?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Is that a good thing or a worrying thing?
  • Does the noise still affect them even if they don't notice it?
Some people say silence is becoming a luxury that only the wealthy can afford. Do you agree?
Examiner follow-ups
  • What examples of that can you think of?
  • Was quiet distributed more fairly in the past?
What effect does constant background noise have on how well people can concentrate?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Are some kinds of noise worse than others?
  • Do children and adults suffer from this equally?
Phones and apps are designed to interrupt us with sounds and notifications. Who benefits from that, and who pays the cost?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Can individuals realistically opt out?
  • Should the design of these interruptions be restricted?
Some countries have introduced a legal right to disconnect from work messages outside office hours. Is that a good idea?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Would it work in your country?
  • Are there jobs where it simply couldn't apply?
Open-plan offices were meant to encourage collaboration. Have they delivered that, in your view?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Why do companies keep building them anyway?
  • What would a workspace designed around concentration look like?
Is the ability to sit quietly with your own thoughts a skill people are losing?
Examiner follow-ups
  • What might be causing that?
  • Does it matter, if entertainment is always available?
Who should be responsible for controlling noise in a city — the government, businesses, or residents themselves?
Examiner follow-ups
  • What problems would strict noise laws create?
  • Can you think of noise that a city should actually protect?
Do you think societies that value quiet — in libraries, temples, trains — are teaching people something important, or just enforcing politeness?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Why do these norms differ so much between countries?
  • Are those shared quiet spaces disappearing?
If attention is becoming the scarcest resource in modern life, how do you think people and institutions will adapt over the next few decades?
Examiner follow-ups
  • Will protecting attention become an industry in itself?
  • Could this deepen the divide between rich and poor?

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

  • Can describe the quiet place in Part 2 for the full two minutes without circling back — the description moves from location to routine to why it works.
  • Handles the abstract turn in Part 3 smoothly: shifts from 'my spot by the river' to 'attention as a resource' without stalling.
  • Buys thinking time in English ("That's an interesting way to put it — I suppose…") instead of falling silent after the harder questions about regulation.
  • Extends answers unprompted: for the right-to-disconnect question, a Band 8+ candidate raises a complication before the examiner has to.
  • Doesn't recite a rehearsed 'technology is bad' speech — engages with the specific question about who benefits from interruptions.

Lexical Resource

  • Precise topic vocabulary: background hum, drown out, tune something out, notification fatigue, uninterrupted stretch, soundproofing, tranquil.
  • Natural collocations — "a constant stream of notifications", "peace and quiet", "switch off properly" — used where they belong, not shoehorned in.
  • Can distinguish near-synonyms under pressure: quiet vs silent, rest vs sleep, hear vs listen, noise vs sound.
  • Paraphrases when a term is missing — "the fee you pay to sit in one of those quiet lounges" works if 'premium' escapes you mid-sentence.
  • Moves into abstract Part 3 register (scarcity, regulation, well-being, cognitive load) without sounding like a memorised article.

Grammatical Range & Accuracy

  • Present habits handled with variety in Part 1: "I tend to…", "I'll usually…", "more often than not I…" rather than five sentences starting with 'I usually'.
  • Comparative structures for the noise questions: "far noisier than it used to be", "nowhere near as quiet as".
  • Hypotheticals for the cue card's final twist: "If I couldn't go there any more, I'd probably end up…".
  • Passive and impersonal forms in Part 3 where they fit: "noise limits are rarely enforced", "it's often argued that…".
  • Complex sentences stay under control — a concessive clause ("Even though the law sounds appealing…") lands and finishes cleanly.

Pronunciation

  • Intelligible throughout; the whispery topic tempts candidates into mumbling — volume and clarity stay up even when describing quiet.
  • Sentence stress carries the contrasts this test invites: "It's not the silence I go for — it's the absence of demands."
  • Tricky topic words stressed correctly: luxury, interruption, concentrate, regulate, notification.
  • Chunking sounds natural — "at the end of the day", "every now and then" — rather than evenly spaced single words.
  • Intonation falls at genuine conclusions, so the examiner can tell a finished thought from a pause for breath.

How to develop a Band 9 answer for this test

Part 1. Give a direct answer, then one reason or detail that could only be yours. For "Is there a sound you hear every day that you've got used to?", a Band 9 answer is specific and lightly reflective: "There's a pressure cooker whistle from the flat downstairs at seven every evening — honestly, if it didn't go off I'd wonder if the neighbours were away." Two to four sentences, natural and unrehearsed; don't deliver a lecture on noise pollution in Part 1.
Part 2 — two-minute planning framework.
  1. Opening / context — name the place and place it precisely: not 'a park' but 'the last bench on the upper terrace of the botanical garden, past the greenhouse'.
  2. Routine — how often you go and what usually takes you there: after a difficult week, before a big decision, most Sunday mornings.
  3. What you actually do — be honest and specific: walk the same loop, sit with a notebook you rarely open, watch the water. Doing 'nothing' described well is more convincing than invented activities.
  4. Why it works — go one level deeper than 'it's quiet': maybe it's that nobody can reach you, or the space is big enough that your problems feel smaller.
  5. How you feel leaving — the cue card asks this explicitly; describe the shift: lighter, slower, decisions somehow already half-made.
  6. The hypothetical — answer the final part of the card head-on: what you'd do if the place were gone, and what that tells you about what you're really looking for there.
Part 3 — Answer → Explain → Example → Alternative View → Evaluation

“Some people say silence is becoming a luxury that only the wealthy can afford. Do you agree?”

  1. Answer: commit to a position — largely yes; quiet increasingly comes with a price tag.
  2. Explain: give the mechanism — cheap housing clusters near highways, flight paths and markets, while money buys distance, insulation and gates; even quiet is now sold as a feature, from noise-cancelling headphones to airport lounges.
  3. Example: one concrete case — compare a flat over a main road with a gated compound two streets back, or the fact that 'silent' train coaches and quiet-floor hotels charge extra for what used to be free.
  4. Alternative view: concede genuinely — public libraries, parks and places of worship still offer silence to anyone, and some of the loudest environments, like trading floors or open-plan tech offices, are full of the well-paid.
  5. Evaluate: land the judgement — the public quiet spaces are the exception that proves the rule, and shrinking; treating quiet as infrastructure, like clean water, would be fairer than leaving it to the market.

Common mistakes for this specific test

⚠️ Describing a place instead of a thinking place

The cue card is about a place you go to think. Candidates deliver a tourist description — scenery, history, how to get there — and never touch what thinking happens there or why. The final 'explain' part is where the marks are.

⚠️ Claiming a place you clearly never visit

Inventing a mountain retreat sounds impressive until the follow-up "How often do you go?" collapses it. A genuinely used spot — a stairwell, a bus ride, a terrace — gives you real detail to draw on.

⚠️ Whispering the whole test

The topic is quiet; your delivery shouldn't be. Candidates unconsciously drop volume and energy describing calm places, and the examiner marks what they can hear. Keep clarity and projection up.

⚠️ Turning Part 3 into a rant about neighbours

Questions about city noise and regulation ask about societies and trade-offs. A three-minute complaint about the wedding band next door is Part 2 material at best — generalise first, illustrate second.

⚠️ Confusing 'quiet' and 'silent' throughout

A library is quiet; a vacuum is silent. Treating them as interchangeable, or inventing forms like 'silency', chips away at Lexical Resource on a test where these words come up constantly.

⚠️ Answering the right-to-disconnect question with a law you invented

You aren't expected to know French labour law. Making up confident false details ("in Germany it's illegal to email after 5pm") risks unravelling under a follow-up. "I believe some European countries have tried this" is safe and accurate.

⚠️ Taking no position on the luxury-of-silence question

"Maybe yes, maybe no, it depends on the person" with nothing behind it caps Fluency and Coherence. Pick a side, or say precisely what it depends on and follow through.

⚠️ Reciting sleep-hygiene advice in Part 1

"You should avoid screens and caffeine before bed…" answers a question nobody asked. Part 1 questions are about you — your last half hour, your habits — not tips for the listener.

⚠️ Overusing 'nowadays' as a crutch

This topic invites past-versus-present contrasts, and weaker candidates start every Part 3 answer with 'Nowadays'. Vary it: these days, over the last decade, compared with when I was at school.

⚠️ Treating the attention question as science fiction

The final question asks for grounded speculation about institutions and habits, not a movie plot. Band 8–9 answers extend real trends — paid focus apps, phone-free schools — one believable step further.

Try another test Pronunciation practice (Spoken English)