How to practice: This set collects only the Interactive Speaking question type from the real DET (Duolingo English Test) — DET Speaking questions. No grading, no timer — solve it yourself, then tap each question to reveal the answer or model response.
Casey — Casey is a philosophy and aesthetics researcher who wants to explore your views on art, beauty, meaning, and the purpose of creative expression.
Turn 1
“Hello! I'd like to begin with a fundamental question: do you think beauty is an objective property of things in the world, or is it entirely in the eye of the beholder?”
Useful Expressions
I find genuinely difficult to resolve... · seems to fail to account for... · My tentative view is... · neither purely objective nor purely subjective
Show Model Response
That's a question I find genuinely difficult to resolve. Pure subjectivism — the view that beauty is simply whatever any individual happens to find pleasing — seems to fail to account for the convergence of aesthetic judgment that we observe across very different cultural contexts. Works widely regarded as beautiful tend to sustain that reputation across time in ways that suggest something more than arbitrary individual preference. On the other hand, the history of aesthetics is littered with confident claims about universal beauty that turned out to be parochial projections of specific cultural values. My tentative view is that beauty involves a transaction between an object's properties and a perceiver's capacities — neither purely objective nor purely subjective.
Turn 2
“If aesthetic judgment involves both objective and subjective elements, how do we approach disagreements about artistic value? Is there any way to resolve them?”
Useful Expressions
I don't think aesthetic disagreements can always be resolved... · not all aesthetic judgments are equally well-founded... · aesthetic criticism resembles other forms of inquiry... · expertise matters, even if...
Show Model Response
I don't think aesthetic disagreements can always be resolved, and I'm not sure they always should be — productive disagreement is often where the most interesting critical thinking happens. But not all aesthetic judgments are equally well-founded. A judgment based on careful, sustained engagement with a work, informed by knowledge of its context and formal conventions, and tested against the responses of others with similar expertise, has more claim on our attention than one formed in haste. This doesn't make it correct, but it makes it more worth taking seriously. In this sense, aesthetic criticism resembles other forms of inquiry: expertise matters, even if it doesn't confer infallibility.
Turn 3
“Do you think art can or should be understood without knowledge of the tradition it belongs to? Or does meaningful engagement require cultural literacy?”
Useful Expressions
there are different layers of engagement... · deepens but doesn't exclusively constitute... · What I'd resist is... · The work should always be able to speak...
Show Model Response
I think there are different layers of engagement with any work of art, and knowledge of tradition deepens but doesn't exclusively constitute meaningful response. Someone encountering a Bach cantata without knowledge of baroque counterpoint or Lutheran liturgical tradition can still be genuinely moved by it — and that response is not trivial. But understanding why certain harmonic choices are transgressive, or how the work participates in an ongoing theological argument, adds dimensions that purely immediate response cannot access. What I'd resist is the gatekeeping implication that cultural literacy is a prerequisite for legitimate aesthetic experience. The work should always be able to speak, however partially, to those who encounter it without full scholarly preparation.
Turn 4
“Let me press on that: is there art that is genuinely inaccessible — that can only be appreciated by those with very specific knowledge?”
Useful Expressions
Yes, I think there probably is... · The question is whether inaccessibility is... · The former seems to me... · makes aesthetic sophistication a form of social capital...
Show Model Response
Yes, I think there probably is, and I'm not sure that's necessarily a problem. Highly technical poetry that draws on an obscure tradition may simply require a very specific preparation that not everyone will want to undertake. The question is whether inaccessibility is a chosen formal consequence or an accidental barrier. Some works are difficult in ways that reward sustained engagement by expanding what the audience can perceive; others are difficult in ways that merely signal membership in a particular cultural circle. The former seems to me genuinely valuable; the latter is more troubling, because it makes aesthetic sophistication a form of social capital rather than a lived transformation of experience.
Turn 5
“What do you think is the primary purpose of art? Is it to express, to communicate, to provoke, to console — or something else?”
Useful Expressions
I'm reluctant to assign a single primary purpose... · art's multiplicity of functions... · art's most fundamental capacity is to... · less about delivering content than about...
Show Model Response
I'm reluctant to assign a single primary purpose, because art's multiplicity of functions is actually one of its most important features. It can console and disturb simultaneously; it can communicate specific meanings and resist any stable interpretation. If I had to identify something that cuts across many of these functions, I'd say that art's most fundamental capacity is to make us attend more carefully — to the texture of language, to the phenomenology of sound or color, to the emotional complexities of situations we might otherwise navigate on autopilot. In this sense, art's purpose might be less about delivering content than about cultivating a mode of perception that is more receptive and alive to the world's depth.
Turn 6
“Has a specific work of art, literature, or music changed the way you see the world or think about a significant question?”
Useful Expressions
What struck me was... · The argument is made so powerfully that... · What that chapter changed for me was... · It also permanently altered my sense of...
Show Model Response
One that comes immediately to mind is Dostoevsky's 'The Brothers Karamazov,' specifically the Grand Inquisitor chapter. What struck me was the way Dostoevsky gives the strongest possible voice to a position he himself opposed — the case that human freedom is an unbearable burden that most people would gladly surrender for security and meaning. The argument is made so powerfully that it cannot be dismissed, and the novel offers no easy refutation. What that chapter changed for me was my understanding of what serious philosophical fiction can do: not resolve difficult questions but hold them open with extraordinary precision and imaginative honesty. It also permanently altered my sense of what I owed to ideas I disagreed with — that rigorous thinking takes the strongest counterargument as its starting point.
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