Duolingo English Test Speaking Practice

Strong answer — score range 130-150

This looks like a bus stop or a coach station, and it has been taken from behind the two people in the foreground. On the left there is an older man in a dark coat and a pale cap, carrying a bag in each hand, and on the right a woman in a patterned coat and heels standing beside a wheeled suitcase. Both of them are facing away from the camera and looking out towards the road, so I would guess they are waiting for something to arrive rather than about to leave. A cream and green bus is parked further along the kerb, and there are a few other passengers standing near it under a metal canopy. The trees behind the bus have no leaves, which makes me think it is winter, and nobody seems to be in a hurry, so the bus is probably not due for a few minutes yet.

Weak answer, and why — score range 60-95

I see two people. They wait for the bus. There is luggage. Behind them is a bus and some trees.

Ninety seconds is a long time. The strong answer fills it by moving outwards: the two figures, then what they are doing, then the background, then an inference about the season and the wait. Stopping after fifteen seconds caps Content no matter how clean the English is.

Model answer — score range 130-150

The gift I want to talk about is a photo album I made for my mother on her sixtieth birthday. I chose it because she is very difficult to buy things for - whenever anyone asks, she says she doesn't need anything - so I decided to give her something that couldn't be bought. Over about two months I collected photographs from my aunts and from old boxes at home, scanned them, and put them in order from her childhood to the present. I wrote a short caption under each one, and on the last page I left space for the years that haven't happened yet. When she opened it at the party she went completely quiet, which is unusual for her, and then she started explaining every photo to my cousins. She kept it on the coffee table for months. That reaction taught me something about presents in general: the ones people remember are the ones that took time rather than money.

Model answer — score range 130-150

My most effective study habit is testing myself instead of re-reading. I started doing it in my second year at university, after an exam I had prepared for by reading my notes over and over and still failing badly. A friend suggested I close the book and try to write down everything I remembered, and the first time I did it I was shocked by how little I could actually produce. Now I read a chapter once, close it, and write a summary from memory, then open the book and mark everything I missed in a different colour. I do that three times over a week rather than in one long session. It works for me for two reasons. First, it shows me immediately where the gaps are, so I stop wasting time on the parts I already know. Second, it feels much more like the exam itself, so by the time I sit the paper the act of retrieving information under pressure is familiar rather than frightening.

Model answer — score range 130-150

I generally prefer studying alone, mainly because I work in short, very concentrated blocks and I find it hard to keep that rhythm when other people are setting the pace. On my own I can stop when I understand something and spend an hour on the one part I don't. Having said that, there was a statistics module last year where studying alone simply did not work for me. I could follow every step of a proof and still have no idea why we were doing it, and it was only when three of us sat down and each explained a section to the others that it made sense. Explaining it out loud forced me to notice exactly where my understanding stopped. So my advice would be to split the two: use group sessions for the parts you can't explain to somebody else, and keep solo time for drilling and revision. And in a group, agree beforehand what you are covering, because otherwise a study session quietly turns into a conversation about something else entirely.

Model answer — score range 130-150

The place I would recommend is a small harbour town about two hours from the capital, on the north coast. It has one main street running down to the water, a working fishing fleet, and a path along the cliffs that takes about an hour to walk. It is not on most tourist lists, and that is exactly why I would send someone there. The famous sites in my country are wonderful, but in summer you spend most of your visit queuing, whereas in this town you can sit on the harbour wall at seven in the morning and watch the boats come in with almost nobody else around. The food is also better and much cheaper, because the restaurants are cooking for local people rather than for visitors. Two practical things a visitor should know: the buses only run four times a day, so it is worth checking the timetable before you set out, and almost everything closes between two and four in the afternoon.

Model answer — score range 130-150

The hardest decision I have had to make was whether to leave a stable job to go back to full-time study. It came up about three years ago, when I was offered a place on a master's programme that I had applied for almost without expecting to get in. It was difficult for two reasons. The obvious one was money: the course had no funding attached and I would be giving up a salary at the same time as paying fees. The less obvious one was that I liked my colleagues and my manager had just started giving me more responsibility, so leaving felt slightly ungrateful. I spent about a month going back and forth, and in the end what decided it was a very simple question a friend asked me - which version of this would I still be thinking about in five years. Looking back, I think it was the right choice, although not for the reasons I expected. The degree itself was useful, but what really changed things was the people I met on the course.

Model answer — score range 130-150

I would argue that the two are not really in competition, but if I have to choose, I think diet matters more for most people, for a simple reason of scale. It is possible to eat badly enough in ten minutes to cancel out an hour of exercise, and almost nobody has an hour a day to spare. So if someone can only change one thing, changing what they eat gives them the larger return on the smaller amount of effort. There is also an accessibility argument. Exercise requires time, and often money and safe public space, and those are exactly the things that people working long hours or several jobs do not have. Food choices, on the other hand, are made several times a day whatever your circumstances. Having said that, I do not think the evidence supports treating exercise as optional. It does things that diet cannot: it protects bone density, it improves sleep, and the effect on mood is well documented. My own experience points the same way. When I was preparing for exams I ate reasonably well but stopped moving completely, and by the end of the term I was sleeping badly and concentrating worse, even though my diet had not changed. So my position is that diet is the higher-leverage change if you only make one, but that anyone who treats it as a substitute for movement is optimising the wrong thing.

Model answer — score range 130-150

I support school uniforms, though not for the reason that is usually given. The standard argument is about discipline, and I am not convinced by it: children who want to misbehave are perfectly capable of doing so in a blazer. The argument I find persuasive is about cost and visibility. Without a uniform, what a child wears becomes a daily, public signal of what their family can afford, and that signal is read very accurately by other children. A uniform hides it. It is not a solution to inequality, obviously, but it removes one of the places where inequality is displayed every single morning. There is also a practical benefit that parents mention more than anyone else: it removes a decision, and an argument, from a part of the day that is already rushed. The strongest objection is about self-expression, and I think it deserves a real answer rather than dismissal. Adolescence is when people work out who they are, and clothing is part of that. My response is that schools can allow expression in ways that do not carry a price tag - in hairstyles, in what students do in their own time, in optional items. What matters is that the compulsory part is cheap and available to everyone, which unfortunately is not true of every uniform policy: when a school specifies an expensive branded jumper from a single supplier, it recreates exactly the problem the uniform was meant to solve.

Model answer — score range 130-150

I think the honest comparison is that they answer different questions, and that a culture which loses either one becomes noticeably poorer. Science answers questions about what is the case. Its contributions are the ones that are easiest to point at - vaccines, clean water, the fact that a broken leg is an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe. It is also self-correcting in a way almost nothing else is: a scientific claim carries with it the method for showing that it is wrong. Art answers questions about what something is like, and about what we should care about. Those questions cannot be settled by measurement, but they are not less important for that. A public health statistic tells you how many people a policy affected; a novel or a film is how a society comes to feel that those people matter. In practice the two are far more entangled than the comparison suggests. Scientific work depends on imagination - on someone picturing a structure or a mechanism before there is any evidence for it - and a great deal of art depends on technique that is essentially technical. If I had to name the difference that matters most, it would be this: science accumulates, so a mediocre physicist today knows more than a brilliant one in 1900, whereas art does not, and a play written two and a half thousand years ago can still be the best thing in the theatre this season.

Model answer — score range 130-150

The skill I would most like to master is public speaking, specifically speaking without notes to a room of people who did not choose to be there. I can present competently when I have prepared every word, but the moment the plan breaks - a question I did not anticipate, a projector that fails - I lose the thread, and that gap between my prepared self and my unprepared self is what I want to close. It matters to me for a practical reason and a personal one. Practically, almost everything I want to do professionally depends on persuading a group of people of something in a short space of time. Research that nobody can explain does not get funded; a good idea presented badly loses to a worse idea presented well. That is slightly unfair, but it is how organisations actually work. The personal reason is that avoiding it has cost me things. I have turned down two opportunities to present work at conferences, and in both cases I invented a reasonable-sounding excuse. I would like to stop doing that. My plan is unglamorous: I have joined a group that meets fortnightly where everyone speaks for five minutes on a topic they draw at random, so there is no possibility of over-preparing. It is uncomfortable every time, but the discomfort is measurably smaller than it was six months ago, and that is the only evidence I trust.

Model answer — score range 130-150

Having done both, I think the trade-off is between access and accountability. Online study is unbeatable on access. It removes the commute, it removes the requirement to live near the institution, and it lets you replay a difficult explanation five times, which no lecture theatre allows. For anyone working, caring for a family, or living far from a university, that is not a minor convenience - it is the difference between studying and not studying. In-person study wins on accountability and on everything unplanned. When you are in a room at a fixed time, the decision to attend has already been made, and that removes an enormous amount of daily negotiation with yourself. It also produces the conversations that are not on the syllabus: the five minutes after a seminar when somebody says the thing they did not want to say in front of the tutor, or the study group that forms because two people happened to sit next to each other. Online courses try to reproduce this with forums, and in my experience it does not work, because those exchanges depend on being cheap and spontaneous. My conclusion is that the format should follow the content. For material that is essentially transmission - definitions, procedures, worked examples - online is as good and often better, because it is repeatable. For anything that requires argument, correction and practice in front of somebody who can see you struggling, in-person is still worth the commute.