IELTS Speaking Part 3: Growing plants
5 Part 3 discussion questions on growing plants, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
Do people in your country like to grow plants?
Very much so, and it's less a hobby here than something close to a default setting. Almost every family with a house in the regions grows something, whether that's a few fruit trees, a grapevine trailing over the courtyard or tomatoes strung along the fence, and relatives in the city are still sent boxes of it every autumn. My grandparents in Guba have apple and quince trees that have been producing fruit longer than I've been alive, and giving that harvest away is part of how they stay connected to people. City dwellers keep the same instinct alive in a much smaller form. Flats in Baku are crowded with balconies full of pots of mint, basil and geraniums, partly because the climate is generous and partly because people crave some living connection to the countryside they came from. Even offices tend to have somebody quietly tending the plants nobody officially owns.
What are the advantages of growing plants at home?
The benefit people notice fastest is what it does for their state of mind. Tending something that grows slowly imposes a completely different pace on you, and ten minutes of watering and pruning after work occupies your hands while your head quietly unwinds, which is exactly why gardening keeps cropping up in research on stress and recovery. It also delivers a small, visible result at a time when most work produces nothing you can actually point at. The practical side matters too, because even a balcony yields things worth having. A few pots of herbs mean you stop buying wilted parsley wrapped in plastic, tomatoes grown on a windowsill taste noticeably richer than supermarket ones, and children who watch a seed turn into food develop a far healthier relationship with eating. Indoor greenery also makes a flat feel softer and less clinical than bare walls do. Given the effort involved, really a few minutes a day, the return on it is surprisingly generous.
Do people like to grow vegetables in your country?
Yes, and in the regions it's close to universal rather than a matter of preference. Households outside the cities almost always keep a vegetable patch stocked with tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs and greens, partly out of habit and partly because it genuinely sustains the family through summer and fills the jars they live on all winter. Pickling and preserving whatever the garden yielded is still a proper seasonal event in a lot of families. In the cities the scale shrinks, but the motive has actually strengthened. Food prices have climbed steeply, and there's widespread suspicion about what's been sprayed on produce sold at the markets, so people grow what they can on balconies and weekend plots specifically to know exactly where it came from. Somebody with a dacha an hour outside Baku will drive out on a Saturday purely to water the tomatoes. The tradition itself runs deep, but the reasoning people offer for keeping it alive seems to update with every rise in prices.
What are the advantages of growing vegetables at home?
The first advantage is knowing exactly what has gone into what you eat. Commercial produce is often picked unripe so it survives transport and may have been sprayed repeatedly along the way, whereas a tomato plucked from your own plant that morning carries none of that history and tastes noticeably different. For families with young children, that certainty about chemicals is the whole reason they bother. The second advantage is economic, and it's more substantial than people expect. A packet of seeds costs next to nothing and can yield months of herbs and salad, so a household growing its own noticeably trims the weekly shop at a time when food prices keep climbing. You also waste far less, since picking what you need that day means nothing rots forgotten at the bottom of the fridge. Cleaner food paired with a noticeably lighter shopping bill is a difficult combination to argue with, and it explains why the habit keeps spreading even among people with very little space.
How do people feel when they eat vegetables that they grew on their own?
There's a genuine sense of pride wrapped up in it, and it actually changes how the food tastes. When you've watched something through months of watering, pests and worrying over the weather, eating it feels like cashing in on an investment, and people will swear their own cucumbers taste better even when a blind test might disagree. That satisfaction stems from having produced something rather than simply purchased it, which is rare in most modern work. The other feeling is a quiet sense of security and belonging. Knowing you can feed yourself from a few square metres of soil is reassuring in a way that's hard to articulate, and for anyone raised in a village, it reconnects them to their parents every time they sit down to eat. That's also why nobody keeps a good harvest to themselves; half of it goes straight to the neighbours. That sharing is really the final stage of the same satisfaction, since the pleasure isn't complete until somebody else has tasted it too.
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.