IELTS Speaking Part 3: Popularity
4 Part 3 discussion questions on popularity, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
What kind of people become famous in your country these days?
Increasingly it is social media creators, and that represents a real break with the past. Twenty years ago fame required an institution behind you, a television channel, a record label or a football club, and each of those had gatekeepers. Now a person filming in their own flat can build an audience of hundreds of thousands without anyone's permission, and a good proportion of the people young people here could name are famous for precisely that. The older routes have not disappeared, though, and they still produce the more durable kind of fame. Successful athletes, musicians and well-known business figures command a respect that tends to outlast them, partly because the achievement behind the fame is visible and hard to dispute. Online fame is easier to acquire and much easier to lose. The two kinds sit alongside each other rather than one having replaced the other, and the audiences for them barely overlap.
Is it easier to become famous today than in the past?
Becoming known is far easier, because the gatekeepers are gone. Recognition used to depend on a talent scout, a record label or a television network deciding to open the door, and that bottleneck meant most people never got a hearing regardless of ability. Now distribution costs nothing, so anyone with an internet connection and one good idea can reach an enormous audience in a matter of days. Staying famous, though, has become considerably harder, and I think that is the part people miss. When there were four channels, the people on them were unavoidable, whereas now attention is spread across millions of accounts and the audience moves on quickly. Someone can be everywhere for a fortnight and be entirely forgotten within a year, so the barrier has moved rather than disappeared. It is no longer about getting noticed at all; it is about still being there when the audience's attention comes round again.
What difficulties do famous people often face?
The loss of privacy is the most obvious one, and it is more total than people imagine. It is not simply photographers outside the house; it is that ordinary activities become impossible, so a meal out or a walk with the children turns into an event that other people record. Anything said carelessly in private can surface later and be read by millions with no context around it. The second difficulty is the pressure of maintaining a public image, which is exhausting in a quieter way. A famous person is not permitted an off day or an unconsidered opinion, because either will be treated as revealing their real character. Living as a curated version of yourself for years takes a genuine psychological toll, and the constant online criticism that comes with it makes that toll considerably heavier. Most of us badly underestimate how much of ordinary life depends on simply not being watched by anybody.
What can celebrities do to protect their privacy?
The most effective thing is deciding in advance what belongs to the public and keeping firmly to it. A celebrity who shares their home, their partner and their children online has effectively invited the audience in, and cannot then object when the audience wants more. The ones who manage best tend to publish a great deal about their work and almost nothing about their private life, so there is simply less material for anyone to pursue. Beyond that there are practical defences, which are less glamorous but do work. Legal teams can act against intrusive photography or the unauthorised use of someone's image, and a good many well-known people simply live somewhere with fewer opportunities to be observed. None of it delivers real privacy, but it decides where the line sits. Once someone is genuinely famous, the most they can realistically do is choose that line early and defend it consistently, rather than hope to be left alone.
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.