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.
The cue card
Describe a sport or physical activity you enjoy.
You should say
- what it is
- how you started doing it
- how often you do it
- and explain why you enjoy 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 it is and how you got into it — the origin story is usually the best part.
- How often, where, and with whom.
- What it's actually like to do: the physical experience, not the rules.
- What you get from it beyond exercise.
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.
get into
the standard phrasal verb for taking up an activity
keep fit
British collocation, more natural than 'stay in shape'
out of breath
concrete physical detail
a bit rusty
for skills gone stale — honest and idiomatic
clear my head
the most common real reason people exercise
I'm no good at it, but
disarming, natural, and lets you continue honestly
The trap on this card
Explaining the rules of the sport.
The examiner isn't learning the game. Describe doing it — the effort, the routine, the people — which is what the card asks.
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 sport I do is climbing, indoors mostly, which I started about five years ago because a friend needed someone to go with and I was too polite to refuse. I go twice a week to a place about fifteen minutes from my flat. What I like about it, and this took me a while to work out, is that it's the only exercise I do where I'm not counting. Running I find tedious because I'm always aware of how far is left. Climbing is a series of problems, and you're thinking about where your left foot goes, and forty minutes disappear. It's also unusually sociable for something you do alone — you end up in conversation with strangers about a particular route, and there's no expectation beyond that. I'm not good, incidentally. I've plateaued at a fairly moderate grade for two years and I've made peace with it. I'm there for the ninety minutes of not thinking about anything else.
What earns the band
- The comparison with running sharpens the point about counting, and comparison is a natural way to bring in complex structures.
- 'Unusually sociable for something you do alone' is a neat paradox stated in plain language.
- Admitting a plateau and being content with it is an unexpected, honest note that no template would generate.
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 children do enough physical activity
- why some sports are more popular than others
- how much governments should spend on sport
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 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.
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.