'Recently' is the operative word — it means you can talk about being a beginner, which is more interesting than expertise.
The cue card
Describe a hobby you have taken up recently.
You should say
1 minute to prepare · up to 2 minutes to speak
Four beats, not four answers. The prompts on the card are a scaffold — a turn that flows past them scores better than four disconnected replies.
Lexical resource is a quarter of your band, and band 7 explicitly allows the occasional wrong word — playing it safe with plain vocabulary is what keeps people at 6.
take up
the exact verb the card uses — start as it means to go on
a complete beginner
sets your level honestly
get hooked
for becoming absorbed quickly
have a go at
informal for trying something
a bit of a learning curve
hedged difficulty
stick at it
for persistence — 'whether I'll stick at it, I don't know'
The card says recently, and a long-standing hobby answers a different one. Beginner detail is specific detail — use it.
Read this to see the moves, not to learn the words. An examiner hears memorised answers every working day and it shows up in your fluency score — the hesitation pattern of someone reciting is nothing like the pattern of someone thinking. The details below are invented; yours should be your own.
The hobby I took up most recently is bread-making, which I started about a year and a half ago and have become slightly insufferable about. I began because a bakery near me closed and the replacement was poor, which is a very mundane origin. The first six months were mostly failures — bread that was dense, bread that didn't rise, one loaf that came out of the oven roughly the density of a brick and which I kept for a while as a warning. What I hadn't anticipated is how much of it is waiting. You do about twenty minutes of actual work spread over eight hours, and the rest is leaving it alone, which I found genuinely difficult because my instinct is to intervene. I think that's why it's been good for me. It's a hobby that punishes fiddling. I now make bread twice a week without thinking about it, and I've stopped photographing it, which my friends tell me is the real milestone.
Part 3 is loosely tied to your long turn, but the questions turn abstract — about people in general rather than about you. This card usually leads into:
A future card, so the grammar is conditional — and the plan needs to be plausible, not aspirational.
Works equally well for someone who plays badly — how you started and why you continue is the material.
Process, sense and culture in one card. The risk is reciting a recipe rather than describing a meal.
Needs a contrast to work — what you're relaxing *from* gives the answer somewhere to start.
Repetition is the subject. Describing something you've done four hundred times needs a different approach from a one-off trip.
Honesty scores here. An answer about something you manage three times a week beats an invented daily regime.
Oliver will read you a card, wait out your preparation minute, and then say nothing at all for two minutes — which is the part you cannot rehearse alone. The report afterwards scores fluency, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation separately. The first test is free.
This guide is written from the publicly published IELTS Speaking band descriptors, in our own words. For the official wording, see the British Council's band descriptors. MockLive AI is an independent practice tool and is not affiliated with IELTS, the British Council, IDP or Cambridge Assessment English.