IELTS Speaking Part 3: Planning
6 Part 3 discussion questions on planning, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
Do old people often change plans?
On the whole they change them far less than younger people, and the reason is that a plan tends to carry more weight once you've built a routine around it. Older people usually settle on something after weighing it up carefully, so the plan already reflects what they genuinely want, and there's little reason to revisit it a week later. My grandfather has visited the same tea house at the same hour for years, and rearranging that would throw his entire day off balance. Where they do change plans, it's usually forced rather than chosen. Health is the big variable, since a bad night's sleep, a doctor's appointment or simply not feeling up to a long journey can scupper something at short notice, and obligations towards grandchildren work the same way. So the pattern differs quite sharply from a young person cancelling because a better offer materialised. In other words, they cling to plans by preference and abandon them only when something beyond their control makes it unavoidable.
Do young people like to change plans?
Generally yes, and the honest reason is that cancelling has become almost costless. A generation ago you agreed to meet somewhere at six and simply had to show up, because there was no way of letting anybody know you'd changed your mind, whereas now a message sent twenty minutes beforehand feels like a complete solution. That convenience quietly encourages people to treat arrangements as provisional. The deeper factor is that young people constantly weigh their plans against everything else on offer. Social media makes you acutely aware of four other things happening that evening, so there's a persistent nagging worry that you've committed to the less exciting option, and with few fixed responsibilities nothing stops you switching. Someone with children and a mortgage simply doesn't enjoy that freedom. It does breed friction, though, because the friend who reorganised their whole day around you tends to remember the cancellation vividly. So the flexibility is real, but it's borrowed against other people's time far more often than most realise.
What are the common reasons when people need to change plans?
Work is probably the single most common cause, because so few people genuinely control their own hours. A meeting that overruns, a deadline pulled forward or a manager asking you to stay late arrives without warning, and most employees aren't in a position to refuse, so the evening's arrangements become the first thing sacrificed. That's especially true in industries where constant availability is treated as a badge of commitment. The other major category is health and family, which crops up less often but proves far harder to argue with. A child running a fever, an elderly parent needing to be rushed to hospital, or simply coming down with flu yourself will scupper anything, and nobody expects much of an apology for it. What links the two is that the decision was never really the person's own, which is exactly why friends accept them so readily. The changes that breed resentment are the other kind, where somebody simply received a better offer and quietly declined to admit it.
How would you tell your friends if you had to change your plans?
The two things that matter most to me are speed and the medium I choose. I'd tell them the moment I knew rather than an hour beforehand, because the whole harm of a cancellation lies in the time somebody has already committed, and an early warning lets them make alternative arrangements. If it's something they'd travelled for or booked around, I'd phone rather than message, since a voice makes it plain you're not treating it lightly. Beyond that, I think you owe people an honest reason and a concrete alternative. A vague apology invites them to assume something better came along, whereas explaining exactly what happened removes that doubt entirely. Suggesting a specific replacement, Thursday evening rather than sometime soon, is what actually signals you still want to see them. It's the silence and the vagueness that damage a friendship, not the change itself. Handled that way, I've never had a friend take it badly, even when the plan mattered enormously to them.
How does technology help people make plans?
The most obvious help lies in coordinating people, which used to be the hardest part of any arrangement. A shared calendar shows when eight colleagues are actually free instead of requiring a chain of phone calls, and a group chat lets a family settle on a date in ten minutes while everyone's still at work. Automatic reminders then stop the plan quietly falling apart because somebody forgot about it. The other contribution is the sheer amount of information you can gather before committing to anything. Planning a trip once meant trusting an agent blindly, whereas now you compare flights, inspect the actual room, read what a hundred previous guests thought and check the forecast for that week, all before paying a penny. Live data keeps helping once you're there too, since maps reroute you around traffic and apps warn you when a train is delayed. Between the coordination and the information, planning has turned from guesswork into something you can keep fine-tuning as you go.
Why do parents still make plans for their children nowadays?
Part of it is that the stakes surrounding education have risen sharply, so parents feel decisions can't be left to chance. Getting into a decent university now hinges on choices made years earlier, which subjects a child takes, which tutor they see, which exams they sit, and a fifteen-year-old genuinely lacks the information to weigh those up properly. Here you see families mapping out the whole run to the entrance exam from early secondary school for exactly that reason. The other driver is simply protectiveness, which seems to have intensified rather than faded. Families are smaller, parents have invested far more in each child, and the instinct is to shield them from wasted years or bad company by structuring their time tightly. That's why so many children's weeks are crammed with organised activities rather than free afternoons. The intention is sound, though the risk is producing adults who've never actually decided anything for themselves.
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.