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.
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 healthy habit you would recommend to other people.
You should say:
- what the habit is
- how and when you started it
- how it fits into your daily or weekly routine
- what difference it has made to you
and explain why you would recommend it to others, and what you'd say to someone who claims they don't have time for it.
You will have one minute to prepare and should speak for one to two minutes.
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.
Examiner follow-ups
- Does blaming individuals actually help anyone get healthier?
- Where does personal choice genuinely begin, in your view?
Examiner follow-ups
- Do such taxes fall hardest on people with the least money?
- Would you extend this approach to other unhealthy products?
Examiner follow-ups
- Does advertising to children change the moral picture?
- What would meaningful regulation actually look like?
Examiner follow-ups
- Who benefits from things staying that way?
- What would it take politically to shift money towards prevention?
Examiner follow-ups
- Is too much advice actually worse than too little?
- How is an ordinary person supposed to tell good advice from nonsense?
Examiner follow-ups
- Can you think of a feature of your own city that helps or harms people's health?
- Who should pay for redesigning cities around walking and cycling?
Examiner follow-ups
- Is that gap inevitable, or the result of decisions someone made?
- What single change would narrow it fastest?
Examiner follow-ups
- Where should the boundary sit between an employer's interest and an employee's private life?
- Would you personally join such a programme?
Examiner follow-ups
- How would anyone fairly decide which illnesses were 'self-inflicted'?
- What would this principle do to the idea of shared healthcare?
Examiner follow-ups
- Which forces are pulling in each direction?
- What role will technology realistically play?
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
- Sustains the Part 2 account of one habit for the full two minutes — origin, routine, effects — without circling back and repeating the same benefit in different words.
- Uses habit-and-frequency language fluently and variedly ("first thing every morning", "I've stuck with it", "it's become second nature") rather than repeating "every day".
- Moves from personal routine to public policy in Part 3 without the pace collapsing — the jump from "my walk" to "government responsibility" is where fluency is really tested.
- Develops positions on contested questions (sugar taxes, insurance) beyond a first sentence unprompted — the examiner shouldn't need the follow-up prompts.
- Buys thinking time in English ("I've honestly never had to decide where I stand on that, but…") instead of falling silent before the fairness questions.
Lexical Resource
- Precise topic vocabulary: sedentary, preventive care, wellbeing, nutritious, processed food, moderation, willpower, sustainable (of habits).
- Natural collocations — "stick to a routine", "a balanced diet", "cut down on sugar", "take up running" — not invented pairings.
- Distinguishes near-synonyms accurately: habit vs routine vs lifestyle; fit vs healthy vs well.
- Phrasal verbs of habit handled correctly: take up, give up, cut down on, keep at, fall out of the habit of.
- Shifts into Part 3 register — public health, regulation, accountability, incentives — without suddenly sounding like a memorised essay.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
- Present habits and their history interwoven: present simple for the routine, present perfect for its track record ("I've been doing it since my final year at university").
- "Used to" and "would" handled accurately for the before-state: "I used to skip breakfast entirely, and I'd feel drained by ten."
- Conditionals carry the Part 3 debates: "If healthy food were the cheap option, most people would…", "Unless cities are built for walking, …".
- Comparatives and quantifiers used precisely for policy answers: "far more is spent on cure than on prevention", "a slightly higher premium".
- Concessive structures for balanced answers: "Even though the choice is ultimately yours, the options in front of you were chosen by someone else."
Pronunciation
- Clearly intelligible throughout — an accent is fine; dropped endings on words like "health", "walked" and "government" are not.
- Sentence stress lands on the contrasts this topic runs on: "prevention, not cure"; "cheap food, expensive consequences".
- Intonation stays engaged when describing the routine — a flat recitation of your morning schedule suggests memorisation, not enthusiasm.
- Multi-syllable topic words stressed correctly: VEGetables, goVERNment, responsiBILity, preVENtive.
- Connected speech sounds natural ("used_to", "sort_of routine", "give_it_up") rather than word-by-word delivery.
How to develop a Band 9 answer for this test
- Opening — name the habit plainly in the first sentence ("a twenty-minute walk before I look at any screen") so the examiner isn't guessing what you're describing.
- Origin story — when and why you started; a trigger makes it memorable ("a doctor's offhand comment", "I couldn't climb the stairs to my flat without stopping").
- The routine itself — walk through how it actually fits your day or week: the time, the place, what you do when weather or travel breaks the pattern.
- The difference it made — separate the quick effects from the slow ones; be specific ("I stopped needing an afternoon coffee within two weeks; the bigger change took months").
- The recommendation — say who you'd recommend it to and why it transfers; a habit that needs no money or equipment is an argument in itself.
- The 'no time' objection — close by answering the cue card's final question directly: what you'd actually say to someone who claims they're too busy, in one or two convincing lines.
“When someone becomes seriously unhealthy, whose failure is that — the individual's, or the society around them?”
- Answer: commit to a weighting — e.g. mostly the environment's, even though the final choice always sits with the individual.
- Explain: give the mechanism — people choose from the options in front of them, and when the cheapest food is the worst food and the neighbourhood has no safe place to walk, 'choice' is doing far less work than it appears to.
- Example: one concrete illustration — the same person often gains or loses weight after moving cities or jobs without their willpower changing at all; what changed was the default around them.
- Alternative view: concede genuinely — plenty of people stay healthy in unhelpful environments, and removing all personal responsibility treats adults like children, which most people rightly resent.
- Evaluate: land the judgement — responsibility is shared but not equally: individuals own the daily choice, while governments and industry own the menu of choices, and the menu shapes far more lives than the willpower does.
Common mistakes for this specific test
Tiny habits sound safe but leave nothing to describe after thirty seconds. Pick a habit with a story — a start date, a routine, setbacks, visible effects — or you'll spend ninety seconds repeating that hydration is good.
The card asks for your habit and your experience. Candidates slide into a lecture on why everyone must exercise, full of "you should" — losing the personal detail that carries the marks and sounding like a fitness advert.
"I wake at five, meditate, run ten kilometres and never miss a day" sounds memorised and gives the examiner nothing human. Mentioning the week you gave up and what pulled you back shows range — past tenses, honesty, and a better story.
This cue card has an unusual final twist — what you'd say to someone who claims they're too busy. Most candidates never touch it, leaving the card visibly unfinished when one prepared sentence would have completed it.
"Have you ever grown anything?" answered with "No, I live in a flat" is a dead end. Extend naturally even from a no: the basil that died on your windowsill, the grandmother who grew chillies, whether you'd try if you had space.
Part 3 asks about responsibility, not about judging people. Answers that blame "lazy people" sound harsh and simplistic — and they close off exactly the balanced, two-sided analysis that scores Band 8–9.
"Taxes are good because sugar is bad" misses the tension the question is built on — freedom versus protection, and who the tax actually hurts. Engaging with the trade-off is the whole point.
"Healthy lifestyle", "good food" and "do exercise" repeated for four minutes shows no range. Name things: resistance training, home-cooked dal, an evening walk after dinner, cutting out delivery apps on weekdays.
"I feel better when I run, so governments should build parks" is Part 2 logic in a Part 3 question. Generalise — "in most crowded cities", "for people working two jobs" — and use your own case only as illustration.
The prevention-versus-cure question rewards precise terms — screening, check-ups, vaccination, early diagnosis versus treatment, surgery, medication. Mixing them up muddies an otherwise strong answer.