Speaking Part 1: Interview: Question 5

Worked solution

Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 response

Fluency & Coherence

Rather than a flat chain of events, each answer is shaped around a small point: question 1 moves from a factual outline to an evaluative comment (“the middle of the day’s fairly standard… but I try to keep my evenings free”), and question 5 balances a claim with a counterbalancing qualification (“that said, I try not to be too rigid”). Spoken markers (“sure”, “honestly”, “once work’s out of the way”, “that said”) keep the delivery connected and natural rather than a recited list.

Lexical Resource

The answers use natural, idiomatic time and routine language rather than bare vocabulary: “once work’s out of the way”, “fit in a run”, “slipping away”, “a bit of spontaneity”. These phrases are precise to the routine topic and are not repeated identically across answers, showing range rather than a single reused formula for describing time.

Grammatical Range & Accuracy

The set demonstrates accurate control of a range of forms appropriate to the questions: present simple for habitual routine (“I usually start with…”), present perfect for a recent, still-relevant change (“I’ve switched to working from home”), and past continuous for background context (“when I was commuting every day”). The shift from present simple in questions 1–3 to present perfect in question 4 is handled correctly and precisely because the question itself asks about change, not just habit.

Pronunciation, the fourth Speaking criterion, cannot be assessed from a written transcript. It is scored only in a live or recorded response.

Common pitfalls specific to this task

See commonMistakes above. A very common intermediate-level slip on this topic is answering “Has your routine changed recently?” purely in the present simple (“I work from home now”) without ever using a present perfect form to mark the change itself, which under-represents the grammatical range a fluent speaker would naturally use for this exact question.