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Difficult cue cards (IELTS Speaking part 2)

Difficult cue cards (IELTS Speaking part 2)

October 5, 2013 By Nestor 7 Comments

Many candidates are worried about part 2 of the IELTS test. They mainly worry about having nothing to say. Unfortunately, you cannot choose the cue card that you are going to get in part 2, but you should be prepared to talk for 1-2 minutes — even if you are asked to talk about a topic that you do not know anything about! Let’s discuss how you can do this.

Imagine you get the following cue card:


Describe a sporting event that you have attended. You should say:

– what the event was
– when the event took place
– who you went there with

and explain how you felt about it

Let’s say that you have never been to a sporting event in your life. Don’t worry. Try to think of something related to the topic, and talk about that instead. For example, you can talk about a sporting event that you have seen on TV. However, make sure you explain the examiner why you are changing the topic!

Read more

Well, unfortunately I have never been to a sporting event, so I’m going to talk about an event I saw on television — the London Olympics. This event took place in the summer of last year. I watched it every day with my family — I mean my husband and my son. They were really interested in the track and field events, whereas I preferred to watch gymnastics. I found it quite exciting since there were several gymnasts from my country who were competing for gold medals. It was also a good excuse to take a break from my household chores and relax for a few minutes in front of the TV. However, I am not very keen on some sports like boxing. Whenever there was a boxing match, my family enjoyed it, but I couldn’t watch. So I went to my bedroom to read a book instead.

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Filed Under: General tips, IELTS Speaking Tips Tagged With: Sample answers, Scary situations, Speaking test Part 2

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. INDRAMANI SHARMA says

    October 5, 2013 at 3:37 am

    i like the idea of native online speaker

    Reply
  2. Mark Aurther says

    April 24, 2014 at 1:31 pm

    Do you have a collection for all the cue cards and then the sample questions? http://www.ielts-mentor.com/cue-card-sample offers many cue cards but the follow up questions are not there.

    I would like to get all the cue cards from the original IELTS exam and then the model answers even if I have to boy the package.

    The youtube.com has many example but few of them are high quality.

    Reply
    • Nestor says

      April 24, 2014 at 6:14 pm

      I don’t believe that studying too many model answers is helpful. I’m going to write a blog post on this very soon.

      Reply
    • Rimi says

      November 21, 2015 at 11:17 am

      Mark,
      Thank you. IELTS Mentor is a worth visiting website for IELTS Candidates.

      Reply
  3. Robert H. says

    September 11, 2014 at 2:37 pm

    Hi thanks for the helpful post on Difficult cue cards.
    Based on Mark Aurther’s comment I have visited the http://www.ielts-mentor.com/cue-card-sample website and there are lots of cue card topics with sample answers.

    Not all those topics are recent and would be required for an IELTS Candidate but knowing about the types of different Cue Cards would definitely help.

    Thanks Mark and the webmaster of this website.

    Reply
  4. Tuly Farhana says

    June 2, 2015 at 11:23 pm

    Dear Nestor,
    The cue card samples in http://www.ielts-mentor.com/cue-card-sample are really helpful. They have a large number of cue card samples. May be all of those are not needed but yet they give a good idea about the types of cue cards I might get in my IELTS Exam as well as how to answer those.

    Waiting for the post you wanted to write about the speaking tips. I must show my gratitude for the wonderful resources you have as well.

    Best regards,
    Tuly

    Reply
  5. Roger says

    June 6, 2016 at 1:59 pm

    I would like to give a head up to this post : http://www.ieltsg.com/2015/04/the-definitive-guide-to-score-high-in.html. I`ve found it very useful for my cue card preparation.

    Reply

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