IELTS Speaking Part 2: Describe a Person Who Loves to Grow Plants – Model Answers 2025

This cue card appears in the IELTS Speaking Part 2 question bank for September–December 2025. You have one minute to prepare and two minutes to speak. The key here is to describe not just what the person grows but why they love it and what that says about them. Go straight into it.

Cue Card

Describe a person you know who loves to grow plants (e.g. vegetables, fruits, flowers).

You should say:
– Who this person is
– What he/she grows
– Where he/she grows those plants
– And explain why he/she loves growing plants

Model Answer

The person I am thinking of is someone I will call JC. On paper, he is a computer science guy — one of the best programmers I have worked with, and someone who built genuinely successful businesses in the IT field. But he gave all of that up. He sold his company, bought land in the countryside, and became a full-time agricultural entrepreneur.

Now he spends his time raising livestock and cultivating different kinds of produce — mainly vegetables, but also animals. He sells livestock products, eggs, molasses, even salt bricks for goats. He also maintains a sizeable vegetable garden, partly to feed the rabbits he keeps. The whole operation functions more like an ecosystem than a simple farm.

One of the things that struck me most when I visited was when he introduced me to aquaponics — a system where you grow crops like lettuce using nutrient-rich water rather than soil, in a vertical setup. It is efficient, it is scalable, and it requires very little land. He had built the whole thing himself.

What I find most interesting about JC is the sincerity of it. This is not a rich man’s hobby. He genuinely fell in love with farming. He works hard at it, and he finds a kind of satisfaction in it that, as he told me himself, he did not always experience in the tech world. In IT, you can put in enormous effort and the result is often invisible — it sits in a codebase or a server somewhere. With farming, the evidence of your work grows in front of you. You can see it, measure it, eat it. He finds that honesty in the process deeply satisfying.

And there is something else worth mentioning. He is genuinely convinced — and I agree with him — that agriculture is one of the few things that is truly sustainable long term. With farming, your hard work pays off in a visible and tangible way. That connection between effort and outcome is something he values more than most people realise.

Why This Works

The answer builds around a real and specific person with a genuinely surprising backstory — a programmer turned farmer creates immediate interest. The aquaponics detail is vivid and accurate. The reflection on why farming feels more honest than IT is personal and analytical at the same time.

📌 Band 7-8 Vocabulary:
– agricultural entrepreneur — someone who builds a business around farming
– aquaponics — a farming system combining fish cultivation and plant growing in water
– ecosystem — a system where different elements interact and support each other
– scalable — capable of being expanded in proportion to need
– tangible — clear and definite, able to be seen or touched

IELTS Speaking Part 3: Growing Plants Questions and Model Answers

Question 1: What do you think of being a farmer?

Model Answer:
I think farming is one of those professions that society consistently undervalues while simultaneously depending on completely. Without farmers, the lifestyle most of us take for granted — where food just appears on a shelf — would not exist.

What I find particularly interesting about JC’s story is that he made the transition from a highly paid white-collar profession to what most people would describe as manual work, and he did it voluntarily and with no regret. That says something real. There is a quality of connection in farming — to the land, to natural processes, to the direct results of your effort — that most desk-based work simply cannot provide.

Beyond the work itself, I think that connection to the earth has a therapeutic dimension that tends to get overlooked. Being physically present in a natural environment, working with your hands, watching something grow because of what you did — I genuinely believe that contributes to wellbeing and even to longevity in ways that are difficult to replicate in an office.

Question 2: Are there many people growing their own vegetables now?

Model Answer:
There has been a noticeable increase — not dramatic, but real. A few factors have contributed to this.

The pandemic was a significant turning point. When supply chains became unreliable and people found themselves at home with time and anxiety on their hands, growing food became both a practical response and a way of feeling some control over the situation. A lot of people who tried it during that period have continued.

The rise of accessible techniques like aquaponics and container gardening has also lowered the barrier considerably. You no longer need land. A balcony or a windowsill is enough for certain crops.

That said, I would not overstate the shift. At the end of the day, most people still operate within a consumerist framework — buying food is faster, easier, and for many, more convenient. The increase in home growing is real, but it is still a minority behaviour.

Question 3: Do you think it is good to let children learn how to grow plants?

Model Answer:
Yes — and I am very pragmatic about why.

The idea is simple: if you teach a child how to grow food now, they carry that knowledge for the rest of their lives. In a worst-case scenario — economic collapse, food shortages, whatever it might be — that skill becomes genuinely survival-relevant. As long as there is land and water, someone who knows how to grow food can sustain themselves.

I remember planting tomatoes as a child, even though I did not particularly like tomatoes. The point was not the preference — it was the knowledge. If things got bad, I could produce food. That kind of practical self-reliance is something I think we are gradually losing in modern education, and I think that loss matters more than most people currently realise.

Question 4: What are the differences between traditional and modern agriculture?

Model Answer:
The core trade-off is between nutritional quality and control.

Traditional agriculture, when done well, tends to produce more nutritious food. Plants grown in season, in natural soil, with proper exposure to sunlight and natural weather cycles, develop differently from crops grown under artificial conditions. The nutritional profile is generally stronger.

But traditional agriculture is vulnerable. Natural disasters, pests, unexpected climate variations — these can wipe out an entire crop. There is a real unpredictability to it that can have serious consequences at scale.

Modern agriculture addresses that unpredictability through controlled environments and genetic modification. You can grow lettuce in a controlled facility year-round. You can engineer crops that resist disease or produce higher yields. The problem is the nutritional compromise. You might grow a tomato twice the size of a naturally grown one, but it may carry significantly less nutritional content. You are getting volume without density.

The ideal is finding ways to bring the reliability of modern methods closer to the nutritional quality of traditional ones. That is where a lot of the most interesting agricultural innovation is happening right now.

Examiner Tips for IELTS Speaking Part 2 Person Who Grows Plants

Tip 1: The surprising backstory is your strongest opening. A programmer who became a farmer is immediately more interesting than a grandmother who has always gardened. Use whatever genuine contrast exists in your chosen person.

Tip 2: Explain why they love it, not just what they do. The “honest connection between effort and outcome” observation is what makes the answer analytical rather than descriptive.

Tip 3: For Part 3, bring in a real-world reference. Aquaponics, the pandemic’s effect on food growing, traditional versus modern nutrition trade-offs — any of these gives your Part 3 answers immediate substance.

Common Mistakes on This Topic

Describing only what the person grows without explaining the emotional or personal dimension of why they love it
Generic Part 3 answers like “it is good for children to learn about nature”
Failing to connect personal observation to a wider point about society or sustainability
Opening Part 2 with “I would like to talk about a person who loves plants…”

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this a confirmed IELTS Speaking Part 2 topic for September–December 2025?
Yes. Describe a Person Who Loves to Grow Plants appears in the official IELTS Speaking question bank for this period.

What if I do not know anyone who grows plants?
Describe someone you have observed — a neighbour with a garden, a relative with a balcony setup. Specificity matters more than closeness.

How much detail should I give about what they grow?
Enough to make it vivid and believable. Three to five specific items or details are better than a long generic list.