IELTS Speaking Part 3: Making decisions
7 Part 3 discussion questions on making decisions, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
Do you think children sometimes have to make important decisions?
Yes, and I think we consistently underestimate them precisely because the decisions don't look dramatic from the outside. The clearest case is academic: by fifteen or sixteen, teenagers here must pick the subject group they'll sit their university entrance exam in, and that single choice quietly forecloses whole careers years before they grasp what those careers actually involve. A boy who drops biology at fifteen has effectively ruled out medicine, and almost nobody frames it to him quite that starkly at the time. The other kind is quieter but arguably weightier, and that's the moral decisions children make with no adult in the room. Deciding whether to report a classmate who's being bullied, or whether to go along with a group you know is behaving badly, is a genuine test of character with real consequences attached. I had friends who lost an entire social circle for refusing to join in on something. Those choices shape the person far more than any exam ever could.
What important decisions do young people need to make after the completion of high school?
The obvious one is what to study and where, and honestly that's two separate decisions bundled together. Picking a field commits you to a body of knowledge, but picking a country or a city commits you to a network, a language and a job market, which in the long run probably matters more. Plenty of school leavers here agonise for months over whether to take a state place at a Baku university or take on serious debt to study in Turkey or Europe, and the financial fallout of that choice follows them for a decade. Alongside that sits a decision people discuss far less, which is how much independence to shoulder straight away. Some go out, find part-time work, move into a shared flat and start managing their own money at eighteen, while others stay at home and remain dependent well into their twenties. That isn't merely a lifestyle preference, because it determines how quickly someone learns to handle real responsibility.
Who can children turn to for help when making a decision?
Parents are the natural first port of call, and for good reason, since they know the child's temperament better than anyone and live with the consequences too. The limitation is that parents often project their own unfinished ambitions onto their children, so a father who never became an engineer can steer his daughter towards engineering without ever noticing he's doing it. That's why the second source matters so much: a teacher, a coach or an older cousin who's genuinely invested but has nothing riding on the outcome. A form teacher who has watched thirty students navigate the same choice can say quite calmly that a particular child is far stronger at languages than at maths, and a teenager will often accept that verdict from a teacher when they'd argue the point at home. Ideally children draw on both. They take warmth and honesty from family, and perspective from someone outside it, because neither source alone is really sufficient.
How do people make important decisions?
Most people like to imagine they decide rationally, and there's a real grain of truth to that, since they gather information, consult people who've been through it, and weigh the costs against the benefits. Somebody choosing between two job offers will genuinely sit down and compare salaries, commuting times and how much the role will teach them. What I've noticed, though, is that the analysis often arrives after the decision rather than before it. The gut reaction comes first, which office felt friendlier or which manager they trusted in the interview, and the spreadsheet gets constructed afterwards to justify a choice already made emotionally. A friend of mine turned down a much better paid position simply because the team seemed cold, and every reason she gave me afterwards was financial. So realistically it's a blend, with emotion setting the direction and reason checking that the direction isn't reckless.
What are the advantages of advertising?
The straightforward advantage is information, because without advertising most of us would only ever buy what we already happen to know about. A small bakery opening in a residential district in Baku can pour a few hundred manats into targeted posts on Instagram and reach exactly the neighbourhood it needs, which twenty years ago would have taken a year of word of mouth to achieve. That reach is what lets newcomers compete with established brands at all, and competition tends to drive prices down and quality up. The less obvious benefit is that advertising quietly bankrolls an enormous amount of what we consume for free. Newspapers, television channels, search engines and video platforms are almost entirely funded by advertisers rather than by us, and if that money vanished tomorrow, most of it would land behind a subscription wall. So for all the irritation it stirs up, it does subsidise a great deal that we take completely for granted.
Do you think the influence of advertising is good?
Partly, though I'd hesitate to call it good overall. On the positive side it does genuinely inform people, and it's been harnessed for things that matter, since the anti-smoking and road safety campaigns here have shifted behaviour in a way lecturing never managed. Where I'm far more critical is the way advertising manufactures dissatisfaction as a business model. It doesn't merely tell you a phone exists; it implies that the one already in your pocket, which works perfectly well, makes you look behind the times. Children are especially exposed to that, since they haven't yet developed any defence against it, and you see ten-year-olds who sincerely believe a particular brand of trainers determines their standing at school. Adults aren't much better, given how many people carry debt for things they were talked into wanting. So the tool itself is neutral, but the commercial incentive behind it pulls firmly in an unhealthy direction.
Do you think advertisements can influence our decisions when shopping?
Enormously, though rarely in the way people imagine. Almost nobody watches a commercial and marches straight out to buy the product, so what advertising really does is determine which name surfaces in your head when you're standing in the aisle facing ten near-identical options. If you've seen a shampoo brand five hundred times it feels familiar, and familiarity gets mistaken for reliability even though you know nothing whatsoever about the ingredients. The second and sneakier layer is everything that happens at the moment of purchase, from the placement at eye level to the yellow discount tag and the influencer whose opinion you half trust. I've caught myself buying a coffee brand purely because someone I follow mentioned it, and I'd have sworn my choice was entirely independent. People insist they're immune to all this, but companies wouldn't pour billions into it every year if it didn't reliably steer our hands towards one shelf rather than another.
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.