Band 9.0 Sample — Describe a Person Who Has Influenced You

The goal I want to talk about is learning to swim properly as an adult — which I finally managed last year, at twenty-eight, after avoiding it for most of my life. My reasons for wanting it were mixed — some of it practical, some more personal. I'd always felt genuinely uncomfortable around water, at beach trips, hotel pools, anywhere like that. But the deeper thing was that I'd been carrying around a quiet sense of failure about it since I was a child. Most of my cousins learned to swim before they were ten, and somehow I'd missed that window and accepted that I just wouldn't be a swimmer. The process was slow, and I had to be deliberate about it. I signed up for adult beginner classes twice a week at a local pool — the instructor there was used to nervous adults, which helped. The first month was almost entirely about getting comfortable putting my face in the water, which sounds trivial but was genuinely hard. Then we moved to floating, kicking, and finally proper strokes. By month four I could swim a full length without panicking, and by month six I was doing laps. The way I felt afterwards was honestly disproportionate to the achievement. From the outside it's a fairly ordinary thing — millions of people can swim. But for me, it was the first time I'd taken something I'd genuinely been afraid of for two decades and just dismantled it methodically, week by week. What I took away from it had nothing to do with swimming, not really. It was more that the fears you've quietly accepted as just part of who you are — the ones you've stopped questioning — turn out to be a lot less permanent than you assumed.

About two years ago I was waiting for a visa for a study programme abroad — and it turned into one of the longer, more stressful waits of my life. I had submitted all the documents in early March and was told the outcome would come within six weeks. Six weeks came and went with no word. I followed up twice by email and got standard automated replies. By week ten I was genuinely anxious — I had already deferred my current job by two months, paid a non-refundable tuition deposit, and arranged accommodation. Everything depended on a decision that seemed to be completely out of my hands. What got me through it was keeping myself busy. I continued working part-time, used the extra time to improve my language skills, and made a point of not checking my inbox more than once a day, because I found that constantly refreshing it made the anxiety much worse. I also told myself that worrying about something I couldn't control was simply a poor use of energy, which sounds obvious but actually took real effort to believe. The decision eventually came through in week fourteen — approved. But what stayed with me wasn't the relief. It was more that I stopped believing patience is something you either have or you don't. You get through a long wait by staying busy — not by sitting with it and hoping you feel okay.

The dish I want to talk about is a slow-cooked rice dish that my family makes for special occasions — it doesn't really have one fixed name because every household has their own version of it, but the base idea is the same across most of the region. You start with long-grain rice, and underneath it goes meat — usually mutton or chicken — that's been marinated overnight in a mix of yoghurt, whole spices, and a handful of dried fruit. What makes our family's version stand out is the balance between the warmth of the spices and a slight tartness from the dried plums layered through the rice. It's slow-cooked, so by the time it's done the whole house smells of it. We usually serve it with a cold yoghurt sauce on the side to cut through the richness. It only comes out for big occasions — weddings, religious holidays, large family gatherings where you want people to feel genuinely looked after. It's not a weekday dish. A proper version takes most of the afternoon because the meat needs time to marinate before everything is layered together and left to steam on low heat. What makes it special isn't really the taste alone, even though that's a lot of it. It's that this kind of dish has become a signal of hospitality in our culture. If you visit someone and they've made it, you know they put in real effort for you. Every family has a slightly different touch — my grandmother uses more dried fruit than most — and arguing over whose version is better is basically a family tradition at this point.