Speaking
Describe your favourite way to relax is a cue card that rewards honesty over ambition. Candidates often reach for something impressive — meditation, classical music, long walks in nature — and then run out of things to say about an activity they do not actually do. The model answer below picks something ordinary and gets two minutes out of it, largely by being specific and by taking the final line of the card seriously.
Describe your favourite way to relax
You should say:
and explain how it relaxes you.
Before you read any further, do the task properly. One minute of notes, two minutes of speaking, recorded. A model answer is far more useful once you have produced your own and can hear the difference.
Read this aloud once you have recorded your own attempt, ideally recording the model as well. Listen back to both and compare your pace and your intonation rather than your vocabulary. The gap is usually smaller than candidates expect on words and larger than they expect on delivery.
Without doubt, the way I prefer to relax is playing video games. Not on a computer, particularly — I mean on a console. I have always liked that sort of thing, but I bought the current one about six or seven months ago and I have barely stopped since, to the point where I would say it is close to an addiction. The games themselves are not cheap, so you do have to save up for them, but the good ones can take weeks to finish, so I suppose it works out reasonably well.
These days I get most of them through a subscription, which gives you a rotating library for a monthly fee, and I only buy something outright if I know I am going to keep coming back to it. I play most evenings unless I am going out or have a lot of work to get through, and even then I usually try to squeeze half an hour in afterwards. At the weekend it can be hours at a stretch, which is almost certainly not doing my eyes any favours.
Anybody watching me play would be surprised to hear me describe it as relaxing, because I can get genuinely irritated when I keep failing at the same section. The reason it relaxes me is slightly different from what people assume. It allows me to be somewhere else for a while, and to stop thinking about work, or about this test, or about anything that has any consequences.
What I notice afterwards is that things I had been avoiding tend to look smaller than they did before. I do not think that is the game doing anything clever — it is simply that I have spent an hour not turning the problem over. I have come to think that having some time entirely to yourself, away from everybody and everything, is more important than it is usually given credit for.
The card asks how it relaxes you, and the final two paragraphs are given over entirely to that. Most candidates spend ninety seconds on the first three bullets and then have twenty seconds left for the part that requires the most demanding language.
Admitting that the activity also makes the speaker angry is more interesting than a straightforwardly positive answer, and it produces a concession structure without the speaker having to force one in.
There is nothing here that jumps above the surrounding language, which is what memorised phrases do. Expressions like squeeze half an hour in and at a stretch are natural, colloquial and precise.
The final sentence moves from personal habit to a broader claim about time alone. That transition is exactly what Part 3 will ask for, and doing it unprompted signals the ability early.
Take the structures, not the content. An answer copied wholesale is audible within a sentence, and examiners hear memorised material constantly. These patterns can be attached to anything.
Describe an activity you do to reduce stress.
and say how effective it is.
Describe something you do in your free time that you would recommend.
and say who would enjoy it.
Describe a hobby you have taken up recently.
and say whether you will continue.
Describe a time when you had nothing to do.
and say how you felt about it.