Speaking Part 3: Discussion: Question 10
Syllabus S.part3
The examiner moves on to ask broader, more abstract questions about leisure and work-life balance.
- Why do you think it has become harder for many people to separate work from leisure time in recent years?
- Do you agree that societies which place a high value on leisure time tend to be happier overall?
- What effect might a shorter official working week have on how people spend their leisure time?
- Has technology made it easier or harder for people to properly relax during their leisure time?
- Should employers bear the main responsibility for protecting employees' leisure time, or is that really up to the individual?
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Worked solution
Examiner notes: why these are band 9 responses
Fluency & Coherence
Every answer states a clear position early, develops it with a specific mechanism or example, and then complicates it with a genuine counterpoint before reaching a final, balanced judgement, giving each extended turn a logical arc rather than a loose list of points. Cohesive language (“that said”, “on the other hand”, “so”) makes the shift between the two sides of an argument easy for a listener to follow.
Lexical Resource
Precise, topic-appropriate vocabulary (connectivity, dissolved, wellbeing, unilaterally, power imbalance) is combined with a genuinely varied set of spoken hedges (“I’d say”, “I suspect”, “my guess is”, “I’d lean towards”), which is exactly the range a band 9 speaker uses to avoid sounding either robotically certain or vague.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
Complex structures are used accurately throughout, including modal speculation layered with conditions (“would push… at least initially”, “would likely depend”), relative clauses (“someone with plenty of free time but no meaningful way to spend it”), and concessive linking (“although I don’t think leisure alone guarantees happiness”). Note that Pronunciation, the fourth IELTS Speaking criterion, cannot be demonstrated in a written transcript and is assessed only in the live test.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the most damaging is answering only from personal experience of one job or routine, when these questions ask the candidate to reason about employers, technology and society more broadly, which is what earns credit at band 7 and above.