Model answer
Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
I want to describe something I only started doing about two years ago and have become slightly obsessed with since, which is open-water swimming. I do it in a lake about twenty minutes' drive from where I live — there's a small swimming club that maintains a roped-off loop and checks the water temperature every morning, which matters more than you'd think once it gets into the fifties in Fahrenheit. Most of the time I go alone, early, before the lake gets busy with paddleboarders and dog walkers, though on weekends a friend from work sometimes joins me and we go for coffee afterwards, half-frozen and slightly smug about having done something before nine a.m. that most people would consider borderline insane. What I enjoy about it is difficult to fully explain to people who haven't tried it — there's a kind of shock to the cold that clears your head in a way that nothing else quite does, and once you're past the first minute or two, swimming through actual scenery rather than staring at a black line on a pool floor feels almost meditative. It's also completely unforgiving of a bad mood; you can't really sulk while you're that cold and that focused on not drowning, so it's become this reliable reset button whenever work has been particularly draining. I never thought of myself as someone who'd willingly get into freezing water for fun, but it's turned into one of the few things I genuinely look forward to.