IELTS Speaking Part 3: Doctors, biology, medical research
6 Part 3 discussion questions on doctors, biology, medical research, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
Do you think being a doctor is easy or difficult?
It's one of the hardest jobs I can think of, and the intellectual demands are only part of it. A doctor is expected to make decisions on incomplete information, within minutes, knowing that being wrong carries consequences no spreadsheet error ever has. The learning never lets up either, treatments my cousin studied at medical school five years ago have already been revised, so she reads and sits examinations on top of full shifts. What people underestimate far more is the emotional weight of it. You cannot tell a family that treatment has failed and then move straight on to the next patient with a clear head, yet that's precisely what the schedule demands, several times a week for decades on end. Combine that with night shifts and you have a profession where exhaustion is common and entirely understandable. The status is real, but I'd say it's hard-earned rather than simply handed over.
Why do some children want to become doctors?
A lot of it starts with how visible the job is. Children rarely encounter an accountant or a logistics manager, but everybody has visited a doctor, and if that doctor was the person who put you at ease when you were frightened, the impression lingers for years. A classmate of mine decided at eight, after a surgeon explained her operation to her properly instead of talking over her head. The other driver is how the profession is regarded, particularly in families here. Being a doctor carries obvious respect, parents mention it approvingly, and there's a well-trodden path from good grades to a stable, admired career, a message children absorb long before they understand what the work actually involves. Television reinforces all of that by portraying medicine as constant heroism rather than paperwork. That's partly why so many of them change their minds once the training actually begins.
Do you think learning biology is interesting for children?
It has one real advantage over the other sciences, which is that the subject is the child. Biology explains why you fall ill, why you resemble your father and what happens to the food you eat, and questions like that occur to children anyway, long before anybody puts them in a textbook. Show a ten-year-old a drop of pond water under a microscope and the reaction is immediate in a way it never is with algebra. Whether it stays interesting depends almost entirely on how it's taught. If lessons collapse into lists of Latin names and diagrams to be memorised for a test, it becomes the dullest subject on the timetable remarkably quickly. Our teacher used to bring in a sheep's heart from the market and let us handle it, and that's the lesson everybody in the class still remembers vividly. The material is naturally fascinating; the teaching is what puts it at risk.
Do you think governments should put a large amount of money into medical research?
Yes, and I'd argue it's one of the few kinds of public spending that reliably pays for itself many times over. Preventing disease is far cheaper than treating it, so money that produces a vaccine or an earlier diagnostic test comes back through hospital budgets for decades afterwards. The coronavirus vaccines are the obvious case, since the underlying research had been publicly funded for years before anybody needed it, which is why the response took months rather than a decade. The stronger argument, though, is that certain research will simply never happen without state backing. Companies invest where the returns lie, so good money flows into treatments wealthy patients take daily and almost none into rare childhood conditions or new antibiotics that doctors would deliberately prescribe as sparingly as possible. If governments don't fund that work nobody will, and we'll discover how costly that gap is at the worst possible moment.
Do you think it is necessary to learn first aid skills?
I'd say it should be as routine as learning to swim. The reason really comes down to arithmetic: an ambulance in a city takes ten to fifteen minutes on a good day, and somebody whose heart has stopped has about four before brain damage sets in, so survival hinges on whoever happens to be standing there. Survival rates roughly double where bystanders start compressions, an extraordinary return on a one-day course. The less obvious benefit is that training removes hesitation. Most people who freeze in an emergency aren't indifferent, they're terrified of making things worse, and that paralysis is exactly what a few hours of practice on a mannequin cures. A friend of mine pulled a child out of a swimming pool and said afterwards she wasn't thinking at all, she was simply repeating what she'd been taught. That's really the whole point of it.
What are the differences between the work of a doctor and that of a nurse?
The cleanest way to put it is that doctors decide and nurses deliver, although that rather undersells both of them. A doctor's core work is diagnosis and prescription, interpreting symptoms and test results, choosing a treatment and carrying the legal responsibility for that choice, which is why the training runs so long. In a busy ward they might see a given patient for ten minutes across an entire day. Nurses provide all the continuous care in between, and that's a genuinely different skill rather than a lesser one. They're the people who notice a patient's breathing has changed at three in the morning, who manage medication, wounds and pain hour by hour, and who explain to a frightened family what's actually happening. When my grandmother was in hospital the doctor made the decisions, but the nurses were the reason she wasn't afraid to be there.
Reading a model answer is not the same as saying one. The sample above shows what a strong Part 3 answer sounds like. What it cannot tell you is how yours sounds — whether you hesitate, repeat the question back, or run out of things to say at forty seconds.
You can record an answer to this exact question and get it marked on fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and pronunciation — the same four criteria the examiner uses.
Common questions
How is Part 3 different from Part 1?
Part 1 is about you; Part 3 is about people in general. The questions move to society, causes and consequences, and the answers are expected to be longer and more developed — an opinion plus a reason plus an example, rather than two sentences.
What if I have no opinion on the question?
You are not marked on the opinion, so pick one and support it. Saying you have never thought about it and stopping there leaves the examiner nothing to assess.
How long does Part 3 last?
Four to five minutes. The topics develop out of your Part 2 card, so the discussion is usually connected to what you just described.
Model answers written and reviewed by The English All-in-One IELTS team. They are teaching models showing what each band looks like, not real candidate scripts.