Describe something you do to stay healthy
Honesty scores here. An answer about something you manage three times a week beats an invented daily regime.
The cue card
Describe something you do to stay healthy.
You should say
- what it is
- when you started doing it
- how regularly you do it
- and explain what difference it makes
1 minute to prepare · up to 2 minutes to speak
How to fill the two minutes
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.
- What the habit is and when you started it.
- What prompted it — a scare, advice, a birthday, someone else's example.
- How consistently you actually manage it.
- What difference you've noticed, physically or otherwise.
Vocabulary this card invites
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.
cut down on
for reducing rather than eliminating
in moderation
the standard hedge about diet
get into the habit of
for establishing a routine
off and on
for inconsistent effort — honest and idiomatic
feel the benefit
the natural collocation for noticing improvement
easier said than done
for the gap between intention and practice
The trap on this card
Describing an ideal routine you don't follow, which is hard to speak fluently about.
Invented detail runs out fast. A real habit with real lapses gives you a whole extra section — the part where you fell off and started again.
A band 8 answer, and why it works
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 thing I do to stay healthy that has actually stuck is cooking almost everything I eat, which I'd say has done more than any exercise I've attempted. I got there by failure. I've joined three gyms in my adult life and attended perhaps eleven times in total, and at some point I accepted that I'm not a person who is going to enjoy a gym. What I do enjoy is cooking, so I leant on that instead. I cook five or six nights a week and I plan it on a Sunday, which sounds joyless and takes about twenty minutes. The effect has been bigger than I expected — I eat considerably better, I spend less, and I drink less as a side effect because it's harder to justify with a meal you made. I do walk a lot as well, though I don't think of that as exercise. My view is that the healthy habit you'll actually keep beats the better one you won't, by a very large margin.
What earns the band
- 'The healthy habit you'll actually keep beats the better one you won't' is a clean maxim earned by the story rather than asserted upfront.
- Admitting eleven gym visits in total is specific, self-deprecating and instantly believable.
- It traces a chain of consequences — cooking to eating better to spending less to drinking less — which is genuine cause-and-effect language.
What Part 3 asks next
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:
- who is responsible for public health
- whether health advice is confusing
- how lifestyles have changed health outcomes
Other activities & habits cards
Describe a skill you would like to learn.
A future card, so the grammar is conditional — and the plan needs to be plausible, not aspirational.
Describe a sport or physical activity you enjoy.
Works equally well for someone who plays badly — how you started and why you continue is the material.
Describe a hobby you have taken up recently.
'Recently' is the operative word — it means you can talk about being a beginner, which is more interesting than expertise.
Describe a meal you like to cook or eat.
Process, sense and culture in one card. The risk is reciting a recipe rather than describing a meal.
Describe something you do to relax.
Needs a contrast to work — what you're relaxing from gives the answer somewhere to start.
Describe a journey you make regularly.
Repetition is the subject. Describing something you've done four hundred times needs a different approach from a one-off trip.
Speak this one out loud
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 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 University Press & Assessment.