A time when you set a goal

You should say:

• What it was
• When did you set it
• How did you achieve it
• Explain how it influenced your life

Sample Answer 1

I don’t think I have strong willpower and many times I set have set goals but failed to achieve them. But last year, I made a new year’s resolution and I made sure I completed it. In 2018, I took my board exams and I, unfortunately, spent a lot of time sitting at home for two to three months. Because of the lack of physical activity, I gained 5 kgs of weight in those months. Due to the weight gain, I also lost confidence and stopped talking to my friends.

Thus, I started staying indoor and I gained even more weight. So, at the beginning of 2019, I decided to lose all the weight that I gained and regain my confidence. I mainly did three things to achieve it.

First, I joined a gym and stayed regular with it. Every day I used to wake up at 6 AM and go to the gym. I spent about 45 mins to 1 hour at the gym. The second thing I did was to control and manage my diet. I stopped eating sweets and packaged products. This was really hard for I love sweets. It was especially hard to give up on chocolates.

The last thing I did was to sleep on time. I could only be regular with the gym if I woke up on time and that meant I needed to sleep on time. Earlier I had the habit of binge-watching TV shows and so I used to stay up late at night. I used to wake up just very late and thus if I did that, I would never have been able to go to the gym.

I didn’t stop watching TV shows, I just made sure I watched only 1 episode every day. My gym trainer also told me that proper eight hours of sleep for muscles to regenerate and heal so sleeping on time was very important. After three months of this schedule, I was finally able to lose all that weight. Doing this made me really confident and I started going out and meeting my friends again.

Sample Answer 2:

I’m the type of person who never likes to rely on luck. I believe that everything can only be achieved through hard work and determination, and my final year in high school was one of the times that I spared no effort to achieve my goal.

At that point, I was still a senior student and like all the other students, passing the University entrance exam to get into my dream University was my main goal. But for me, I felt that the pressure was even higher since I had chosen Central Medical University – one of the top Universities in my country. There are thousands of students taking part in that exam every year so it is highly competitive.

In order to compete with the other candidates, every day I would spend hours in the library to read as many books as possible and to learn as much as I could. And even after school, I usually stayed up late to review everything I had learned that day. It was a long process with a lot of hard work but I didn’t feel tired at all because becoming a doctor was one of my greatest desires. I was willing to put in a lot of hard work and effort for that dream and to not let anything stop me from achieving it.

So in the end, all the hard work paid off, and I passed the entrance exam with outstanding results and became a medical student. When I received the results, I was so happy that I burst into tears. All of my hard work for the year had helped me achieve one of my big goals in life so far.

Vocabulary highlights:

1. rely on luck – to leave things to chance or fate
2. spared no effort – to try as hard as possible
3. desires – a strong feeling of wanting something
4. hard work paid off – got good results due to a lot of effort
5. outstanding – very good, or excellent
6. burst into tears – to suddenly begin to cry