IELTS Speaking Part 3: Food and cooking
6 Part 3 discussion questions on food and cooking, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
What food do you (people in your country) eat on special occasions?
Almost every major celebration here revolves around plov, which functions as our national dish rather than merely a way of cooking rice. It's layered and slow-cooked with saffron, and depending on the occasion it's served with lamb, chestnuts and dried apricots, or with herbs and fish, so the version on the table gives away exactly what's being marked. At a wedding it usually arrives last, carried in as the lights dim, and everyone instinctively senses the evening has reached its peak. The other half of any special occasion is the sweets, particularly around Novruz in spring. Households spend days beforehand baking pakhlava and shekerbura, and the tray of pastries stays out for anyone who drops by during the holiday week. Since those pastries demand real effort to prepare, offering them signals that guests were worth the trouble. Between the plov and the pastries, you can generally work out what's being celebrated before a single word has been said.
What is the difference between special food in your country and other countries?
What stands out immediately is the ingredients, because our festive cooking leans on a sweet-and-savoury pairing that most European cuisines steer well clear of. A dish like Shah plov brings together saffron rice, lamb, chestnuts and dried apricots in a single pot, reflecting Azerbaijan's position along old trade routes where Persian and Caucasian cooking converged. French or Italian celebration food tends to work the opposite way, keeping the meat clean and letting a single sauce or herb carry the flavour. The other genuine difference lies in how much labour a special dish is expected to demand. Our signature foods are deliberately time-consuming, so wrapping dolma draws the whole family into the kitchen for an afternoon, turning the cooking itself into part of the celebration rather than mere preparation for it. Elsewhere a special meal is often defined by the expense of the ingredients instead, whereas ours is defined by the hours poured into it.
Why do many people like to spend a lot of money on food on special days?
Spending lavishly on food is really a way of paying respect to the people you've invited. In cultures like ours the table is read as a statement about how highly guests are valued, so serving something cheap at a wedding would be taken as a genuine insult regardless of what anyone says aloud. Families will go into debt for a wedding banquet precisely because everyone in the room is quietly gauging the generosity on display. There's also a simpler psychological reason at play, which is that a special day grants people licence to break their everyday rules. Most of us eat carefully and cheaply all year round, so the occasion becomes the one moment an expensive cut of meat or imported fish feels justified rather than wasteful. The cost is part of what makes the memory stick, since a meal you'd eat any ordinary Tuesday wouldn't set the day apart at all.
What do you think of people using their mobile phones during a meal?
Honestly, I think it undermines the whole point of sitting down together. A meal is one of the few remaining occasions when a family shares a room with nothing else to do, and the instant somebody's attention drops to a screen, the conversation flattens into small talk. You see it constantly in restaurants, four people at a table, all scrolling, and the meal ends without anyone recalling a word of it. That said, I'd stop short of branding it always unacceptable, because the rule has to bend for genuine circumstances. Someone awaiting news about a sick relative, or a doctor who might be called in, shouldn't have to apologise for keeping their phone face-up on the table. What actually irritates people isn't the device itself but the message it sends, so a quick word of explanation before checking something usually defuses the tension completely.
Do you think it's good to communicate when eating with your family?
I'd say it's one of the most valuable habits a family can cultivate, mainly because it's the sole moment in the day everyone is reliably under the same roof. Work and school pull people in different directions, so if nobody talks over dinner, weeks can slip by without anyone noticing that a child is struggling or a parent is under real strain. Plenty of problems surface at the table simply because somebody falls quiet in a way they normally wouldn't. The second benefit falls mostly on children, who absorb an enormous amount of language and social judgement from listening to adults converse. Hearing how your parents disagree politely, steer a subject or spin a story teaches conversational skill far more effectively than anyone could teach it deliberately. Beyond the food itself, those twenty minutes do a lot of quiet work. You can see the difference in families who've abandoned the habit, where everyone eats separately in front of a screen and nobody quite knows what's going on with anyone else.
More and more people are unwilling to cook. Why is this happening?
The obvious pressure is time, or at least how drained people feel by the end of a working day. When you stagger home at eight after a long commute, forty minutes of chopping, cooking and washing up feels like a genuine obstacle, and a delivery app removes it in three taps for barely more than the ingredients would cost. Baku now has restaurants delivering everything from qutab to sushi within half an hour, so the convenient option is permanently sitting in your pocket. Underneath that, though, the skill itself is quietly fading between generations. My grandmother learned to cook by standing beside her mother for years, whereas plenty of people in their twenties have never been taught and find the whole process intimidating rather than relaxing. Once you can't cook with any confidence, ordering stops feeling like laziness and starts feeling like the sensible choice. The habit then never takes root, and the next generation grows up with even less reason to learn it than the last one had.
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.