IELTS Speaking Part 3: Friendship, social media
6 Part 3 discussion questions on friendship, social media, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
Do you still keep in touch with your friends from childhood?
With a small handful, yes, and those remain easily the most comfortable friendships I have. There are two or three people I've known since primary school, and because they knew me long before I'd worked out who I wanted to be, there's no performance involved when we meet. We can go three months without speaking and pick up mid-conversation, which never quite happens with people you met as an adult. The wider circle has faded, though, and I don't think that reflects anybody's failure. Once people scatter into different universities, cities and working hours, a friendship demands deliberate effort, and shared memories alone aren't enough to sustain it once you no longer have anything current in common. Social media keeps them technically present, so I know who got married and who moved abroad, but knowing facts about someone isn't the same as being genuinely present in their life.
What's the difference between having younger friends and older friends?
With older friends the main difference is perspective, because they've usually already weathered whatever you're currently panicking about. When I was agonising over a career choice, a friend fifteen years my senior could tell me candidly which parts had actually mattered and which hadn't, and that sort of advice simply isn't available from someone your own age. There's also less rivalry involved, since you're not competing for the same jobs or measuring your progress against theirs. Friendships with younger people cut in the opposite direction and are valuable for exactly that reason. They keep you current, they're generally more willing to try something on a whim, and their enthusiasm proves genuinely contagious in a way that people worn down by responsibility often aren't. You also end up explaining things, which quietly forces you to work out what you actually believe. The older ones stop you making mistakes, and the younger ones stop you growing stale.
Has technology changed people's friendships? How?
It's changed them enormously, and the clearest gain is that distance no longer kills a friendship outright. Twenty years ago a friend emigrating meant expensive phone calls and a relationship that quietly withered, whereas now a video call costs nothing and you can watch their children grow up from another continent entirely. I've sustained a close friendship for six years with someone in Canada that would certainly have died out in an earlier era. The complication is that the same tools have made contact so cheap it can substitute for the real thing. Liking somebody's photograph creates the sensation of having been in touch without any of the substance, so people end up with hundreds of connections and a shrinking number they'd actually call at midnight. Technology has widened the circle and thinned it out simultaneously. There's a performance element to it now too, where friendships are partly conducted in public and people end up quietly performing closeness for an audience that isn't genuinely involved.
What do you think of communicating via social media?
I think it's genuinely useful as long as you're realistic about what it's good at. For coordinating a group it's unbeatable, since organising eight people around one dinner used to take a dozen phone calls and now takes a single message thread, and it lets you stay loosely aware of people you'd otherwise lose touch with entirely. For anyone living abroad, it's the difference between feeling part of a family and hearing about it after the fact. Where it falls apart is on anything emotionally significant, because text strips out tone, and a message meant lightly can land as an outright insult. I've watched two friends fall out over a sentence that would obviously have been a joke had either heard the other's voice. It also encourages a curated version of everyone's life, which quietly makes people feel worse about their own. So I use it happily for logistics and staying loosely in touch, but I pick up the phone for anything that genuinely matters.
Will online social media replace face-to-face communication?
I don't believe it will, because too much of human communication simply doesn't survive a screen. Tone, timing, the pause before somebody answers, and the sheer fact of sitting beside a friend who's upset all carry information that a video call flattens and a message loses completely. That's precisely why companies which went fully remote keep flying their teams together anyway; the conversations that actually mattered turned out not to happen otherwise. What will keep happening, though, is that the routine end of interaction migrates online for good. Meetings that were pure information transfer, catching up with a distant cousin, or asking a colleague a quick question are all handled more efficiently by a message, and nobody misses the commute involved. Face-to-face contact will grow rarer and correspondingly more valuable rather than vanish altogether. That's the divide I'd expect to hold for a long while yet, substitution at the shallow end of communication and stubborn resistance at the deep end where it genuinely counts for something.
Is it necessary for kids to have some close friends?
I'd say it's close to essential, mainly because a great deal of social competence can only be learned among equals. With adults a child is always in the weaker position and can simply be told what to do, whereas with a friend they have to negotiate whose game gets played, patch things up after an argument and read when somebody is genuinely upset. Those are skills no lesson can teach, and children who miss out on that practice tend to struggle later in workplaces and relationships. The second reason is emotional, and it becomes obvious around adolescence. Children need at least one person outside the family they can confide embarrassing things to, and a close friend absorbs worries a teenager would never bring to a parent. Research on bullying consistently finds that having even a single reliable friend offers the strongest protection there is. Popularity isn't really the point, though; one or two genuine friendships do the job that fifty casual acquaintances never could.
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.