IELTS Speaking Part 3: Leisure time
5 Part 3 discussion questions on leisure time, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
What leisure activities do old and young people prefer?
The gap is mostly about screens and stimulation. Young people here spend their free time online in one form or another, whether that's gaming, scrolling or bingeing series, and when they do venture out it's usually to a cafe or a shopping centre with friends, so the activity stays social but also fast-moving and constantly shifting. They get bored quickly, which is why the fashionable place to meet changes every eighteen months. Older people gravitate towards things that are slower and more repetitive, and crucially towards the same people every time. In any park in Baku you'll spot men in their seventies playing backgammon and sipping tea in exactly the same spot every afternoon, and women visiting each other's homes in a fixed rotation. Gardening, television and grandchildren fill most of the remaining hours, and what strikes me is that older people crave familiarity from their leisure while the young crave novelty.
How do people spend their leisure time in your country?
Almost everything revolves around other people, which is the first thing a visitor notices. Free time here means going to someone's house or hosting them, and a Sunday can easily dissolve into a five-hour meal with relatives you also saw last week, with tea and conversation stretching long after the food is finished. Sitting alone with a book on a day off would strike most families as slightly sad. The other half of it is seasonal and outdoors, because our summers push everyone towards the coast and spring pulls people out to the regions. From June the beaches north of Baku are packed every weekend, and at other times people drive to Gabala or Guba for a picnic, since barbecuing in the open air amounts to something close to a national pastime. The younger city crowd has added cinemas and shopping centres to the mix, but the pattern remains gathering rather than doing.
How does technology affect the way people spend leisure time?
It's handed people an almost absurd amount of choice, and that part is genuinely a gain. Someone in a small town who once had four television channels can now watch anything ever filmed, learn the guitar from a stranger in another country and play chess at three in the morning against somebody in Argentina, all from one phone. Hobbies that once required living in a city with the right club are now available anywhere. The cost is that the same device has swallowed the free time it liberated, and a lot of what we call leisure is now just scrolling with no decision behind it. I've lost whole evenings that way and felt worse afterwards than if I'd done nothing at all, which is a strange sort of rest. Technology has also quietly dragged socialising indoors, so friends who'd once have met in a courtyard now play online and call it the same thing.
Is leisure time important for everyone?
It's essential, and I'd argue it isn't a reward for work so much as a condition of doing work well. Concentration is a finite resource, so somebody working twelve hours a day for a month isn't producing more than someone working eight; they're producing steadily worse output while feeling busier, and the exhaustion eventually surfaces as illness or burnout. Teachers I know who never take a proper break are noticeably shorter-tempered with their students by March. The other reason is that leisure is where people build the parts of themselves that aren't their job. If everything you are is your position at work, then losing it or retiring from it is genuinely devastating, whereas somebody who paints, or fishes, or has spent twenty years with the same football friends still has a life to fall back on. That applies to everyone, not merely to people in demanding careers.
Do you think only old people have time for leisure?
Not at all, though I understand where the impression comes from. Retired people obviously have larger blocks of unstructured time, and their leisure is visible, because sitting in the park in the middle of a Tuesday is something the rest of us actually witness. Plenty of them are far busier than the stereotype suggests, since grandchildren get handed to grandparents constantly here, and many pensioners keep working because the pension doesn't stretch far enough. Everybody else has leisure too; it's just chopped into small pieces and hidden inside the working week. A student between classes, a mother during a child's nap, a professional on the metro, those are all leisure, and the average person spends hours a day on a phone, which rather undermines the claim that there's no time to speak of. So it's usually a question of how the available time gets used rather than how much of it actually exists.
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.
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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.