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.
The cue card
Describe a meal you like to cook or eat.
You should say
- what it is
- who you usually have it with
- how it is prepared
- and explain why you like it
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 dish is and where it comes from.
- When it's eaten — everyday, occasional, tied to a season or an occasion.
- The making of it, in broad strokes, with the one step that matters most.
- Who you eat it with, and what the meal is like as an event.
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.
a staple
for a food eaten constantly
simmer
and 'fry', 'roast' — precise cooking verbs score better than 'make'
the smell fills the house
sensory detail that lifts the answer
comfort food
the exact phrase for food eaten for reassurance
it's better the next day
specific, true of many dishes, and memorable
tuck in
idiomatic for starting to eat enthusiastically
The trap on this card
Listing ingredients and quantities.
A recipe is not a description. Two sentences on how it's made, then the smell, the table, and the people.
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 meal I cook most often and enjoy most is a fish curry that my mother makes and which I've been slowly failing to replicate for about eight years. It's a coastal recipe — coconut, tamarind, a lot of green chilli — and it takes about forty minutes once everything's prepared, though the preparation is most of the work. What I like about cooking it is that it's a recipe I can't get from a book. I've watched her do it perhaps thirty times and she measures nothing, so I've had to build it up by tasting. Mine is now close. It isn't the same and I've stopped expecting it to be. I cook it when people come over, partly because it's reliably good and partly because it's the one dish where I can tell someone something about where I'm from without making a thing of it. My mother has tried mine once. She said it was very nice, which from her is not a compliment.
What earns the band
- The closing joke about the mother's verdict is beautifully understated and depends entirely on shared cultural knowledge being implied rather than explained.
- 'Tell someone something about where I'm from without making a thing of it' is a subtle idea about food and identity.
- The gap between the original and the copy is used as the answer's structure, giving it a shape beyond a recipe.
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:
- whether traditional cooking is being lost
- how diets have changed in your country
- the influence of foreign food on local cuisine
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 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.
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.
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.