IELTS Speaking Part 3: Visiting others, accommodation
4 Part 3 discussion questions on visiting others, accommodation, with developed sample answers of the kind Part 3 expects.
In your country, when people visit other people in their homes, do they usually bring a gift?
Yes, almost without exception, and turning up empty-handed would genuinely be noticed. The standard offering is something for the table, a box of pastries, a cake, or fruit from the market, because the host will have cooked for two days no matter what they said about it being an informal visit. Arriving with nothing feels like dismissing all that effort outright. Even close friends keep the custom up, and my aunt would be mortified to walk into a neighbour's flat empty-handed. The other half of the tradition is bringing something for the children of the house, usually chocolate or a small toy, which in a way matters more than the gift for the adults. What's expected is the gesture rather than the expense, so nobody actually judges the price. Turning up with something extravagant can even make people uncomfortable, since it places them under an obligation to match it.
What kind of houses or apartments do people prefer to buy?
Location tends to dominate everything else. In Baku, buyers will accept a smaller flat in a well-connected district near a metro station and a decent school rather than a spacious one on the outskirts, simply because two hours a day stuck in traffic wears people down and resale value tracks the transport links closely. New buildings with parking and a lift are strongly favoured over Soviet-era blocks for much the same practical reasons. The second consideration is family structure, which pushes people towards more rooms than a Western buyer would think necessary. Grandparents often live with the family, adult children stay at home until they marry, and guests are entertained constantly, so a three-bedroom flat with a separate sitting room becomes the realistic target for a couple who'd manage fine with two. Older people who can afford it often want a house with a garden outside the city, but that's usually a second property rather than a primary one.
What is the difference between living in the countryside and the city?
The most obvious gap lies in opportunity and infrastructure. Cities concentrate the jobs, the universities and the specialist hospitals, so a young person in a village who wants to work in finance or design essentially has no option but to move, which is why regions all over Azerbaijan keep losing their under-thirties to Baku. You pay for that access with cost, traffic and a certain permanent low-level stress. The deeper difference, though, is social. In a village everybody knows who you are, whose son you are and what you did last week, which means real support when something goes wrong and almost no privacy when it doesn't. In a city you can live next door to someone for five years without ever learning their name, and people find that either liberating or lonely depending entirely on temperament. Neither is objectively better; they simply suit different stages of life.
Do you prefer to live in the city or in the countryside?
The city, at least for the next ten years or so. Almost everything I want to do professionally exists in one place, and being physically near it matters more than people admit, because the useful conversation happens at an event you were invited to at short notice, and you can't attend that from a village two hours away. Beyond work, I relish the variety a city forces on you, since in a single week you'll hear three languages on the metro and eat food you'd never have cooked yourself. I'm not romantic about the countryside either, having stayed with relatives in the regions long enough to know that after a fortnight the quiet stops feeling restful and starts feeling like nothing is happening at all. Ask me again at sixty, though, and I suspect the answer flips entirely. Clean air and a garden become far more appealing once you're no longer chasing anything.
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.