Needs a contrast to work — what you're relaxing *from* gives the answer somewhere to start.
The cue card
Describe something you do to relax.
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.
wind down
the precise phrasal verb for relaxing after activity
switch off
for mental disengagement
put my feet up
idiomatic for physical rest
take my mind off things
the most common actual mechanism
a bit of me time
informal, current, and natural
recharge my batteries
for restoring energy over a longer period
Whatever the activity, the answer lives in the ritual around it — the time, the place, the cup of tea, the phone put away.
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 way I actually relax, as opposed to the way I'd like to say I relax, is walking with no destination. I'd love to claim it's meditation or reading. It's leaving the flat and walking for an hour in whatever direction seems reasonable. I do it most evenings and more when something's bothering me. What makes it work, I think, is that it occupies the part of my mind that would otherwise be looking for something to do. Sitting still doesn't relax me at all — I get restless and end up on my phone, which is the opposite of restful. Walking gives that part of me a job and lets the rest wander. I've noticed I solve things on walks that I couldn't solve at a desk, and I've read since that this is well documented, which was satisfying. The only downside is weather. I do go out in the rain, and I always regret it about fifteen minutes in, and I go again the next night.
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.
'Recently' is the operative word — it means you can talk about being a beginner, which is more interesting than expertise.
Process, sense and culture in one card. The risk is reciting a recipe rather than describing a meal.
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.