Speaking: Sport and Exercise Vocabulary Pack

I do sport is grammatical. When answering a specific question, naming the activity gives more precise information. Here are common examples of three verbs used to talk about sport and exercise; these are not rigid categories covering every activity:

• play — for team and ball games: play football, play basketball, play tennis
• go + -ing — with many activities involving movement, for example: go swimming, go jogging, go skiing
• do — for individual workouts and martial arts: do yoga, do karate, do exercise

Part 1 may include questions about hobbies and lifestyle, but these are not guaranteed to be the first topics. When the question calls for a specific activity, add detail rather than only saying I do sport: I play volleyball or I go to the gym. You can also use be into to express an interest: I'm really into football. Relevant details and expressions can make the answer more precise; no single expression shows which language someone thinks in or whether they translate.

Practise using these five phrases appropriately. They may suit a Part 1 question such as 'Do you do any sport?' or a Part 2 hobby description; not every phrase fits every question:

You can combine these phrases to build full, natural sentences: I recently took up running to keep fit, so now I jog on a regular basis. In this example, the phrases combine logically to express an idea. This is useful practice, but one sentence does not reveal how you learned the words or guarantee a particular score.

Don't settle for answering the question 'How often do you play sport?' with only sometimes or usually. There are several natural ways to express frequency:

• Exact frequency: twice a week, three times a month, every other day
• Soft frequency: most weekends, almost every evening, whenever I get the chance
• The honest admission (very human and natural): to be honest, not as often as I should

Examples:

• I go jogging twice a week before work.
• I play table tennis with my cousins every now and then.
• To be honest, I don't work out as often as I should, but I try to swim at weekends.

In the next sections we will add the extended vocabulary bank, full model answers and Part 3 frames on top of these structures.