Describe a subject you did not like when you were at school but now you find interesting.
You should say:
- what subject it was
- how much time you spent to learn it
- why you did not like it in school
and explain why you find this subject interesting now.
[You will have to talk about the topic for one to two minutes. You have one minute to think about what you are going to say. You can make some notes to help you if you wish.]
Model Answer
Is learning the ‘history’ of the world necessary? The answer is “yes”. Then again, I always asked myself during my school years if remembering the facts about some dead people, who were only too busy killing others at every opportunity, was worth the effort and time. And I have asked the same questions again and again from 6th grade to 10th grade keeping myself busy learning the “history” of the world, only to find out that the “History” subject wasn’t exactly “my cup of tea”. In fact, “History” was my most boring subject during my school years. There, I just said it!
The main reason, why I didn’t exactly enjoy studying it, was because it involved a lot of memorization of some random dates while learning about Christopher Columbus “discovering” the continent of North America, even though the native Americans/red Indians were living there already, didn’t exactly make much sense to me. Besides, learning how “Genghis Khan” killed millions to expand his empire wasn’t exactly something I was interested to learn during my school years. On top of that, the history class wasn’t interactive, with little or no opportunity for active participation, making it even more tedious and tiring. Finally, the subject seemed difficult for me as I never got a good grade in it, even after trying my best.
As a result, I did not study it much. While some of my classmates, who grew an affection for this subject, were up to reading “history” from many different sources, I invested a little time reading anything related to history outside my syllabus.
However, as I am older and beginning to learn about the world objectively, I feel like learning history is imperative. The very reasons I used to dislike “History” as a subject seem rather interesting to me now. Learning history can be engaging, compelling and intriguing because, without it, we just won’t be able to learn our past to create the future we prefer.
Learning history can be fascinating as it helps us understand our world at present as the culmination of many past events. Besides, learning history can be fascinating as it stores data and information on how people and societies behave. Finally, our world has gone through many fascinating changes in the past, and we don’t understand why those changes took place; it will be just mighty tricky for us to predict any event that is supposed to happen in the future. However, history also teaches us that we humans don’t exactly learn from history. What an irony!