IELTS Cue Cards 2026: 15 Part 2 Cards by Topic Family with Two-Minute Model Talks

The 60-second routine (TalkDrill)

Seconds 0 to 10: read the card once and choose your example. Choose the first true one that comes to mind; do not search for a better one. Seconds 10 to 45: write one row per bullet, three to five words each, nouns and numbers only. Seconds 45 to 60: decide your first sentence and your last sentence. The first sentence names the thing; the last sentence answers "and explain why". If you know how you will start and how you will end, the middle looks after itself.

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

The person I want to talk about is my uncle, my father's younger brother, who taught me how to ride a motorcycle when I was seventeen. He runs a small spare-parts shop in Jalandhar, and he is the kind of person who can fix anything with a screwdriver and a bit of wire.

The skill was not just riding, to be honest. He taught me how to understand the machine. Before I was allowed to start the engine, he made me learn what the clutch does, how the gears work, and how to check the oil and the tyre pressure. I remember being impatient, because my friends were already riding around the colony, but he said that a person who does not understand the machine will panic when it stops.

The way he taught me was very practical. Early every morning for about two weeks, before the shop opened, we went to a quiet road behind the grain market. He would show me once, then make me do it ten times. He never shouted, but he never praised me either until I got it right. When I stalled the bike for the fifth time in a row, he just said, "again", and that was it.

This skill has been useful in ways I did not expect. Obviously I can get around the city, and during my first job I used the bike to visit clients across Punjab. But the bigger thing is the habit he gave me of understanding how something works before I rely on it. I do the same now with software at work. Whenever I am stuck, I can still hear him saying "again".

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

I would like to talk about Mrs Fernandes, who lived on the ground floor of our building in Bandra for most of my childhood. She must be nearly eighty now. She was a schoolteacher for forty years, and even after retiring she never really stopped teaching.

I know her because our families were neighbours, but the real connection started when I was about ten and failing in English. My mother asked her for help, and every evening at five I went downstairs with my notebook. There was no fee; she refused when my parents offered. She said that the building was her classroom now.

As a person, she is strict and kind at the same time, which I did not think was possible. She notices everything. If you say "I am having a doubt", she will correct it to "I have a question" before you finish the sentence, but she will also remember that your exam is on Tuesday and ask how it went. She lives alone, walks to church every morning, and still reads two newspapers a day with a pencil in her hand.

I respect her for two reasons. The first is her discipline; at her age she still has a timetable and follows it. The second is that she gave her time to children who were not her own and expected nothing back. A lot of what I know about English, including the confidence to sit this test, started in her living room. When I visit Mumbai I still go down to see her first, before I even unpack.

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

The quiet place I want to describe is the reading room on the top floor of the public library near my house in Thiruvananthapuram. It is an old building with high ceilings and wooden tables, and because very few people know the top floor is open to the public, it is almost always nearly empty.

I go there two or three times a week, usually in the late afternoon after my classes finish. The walk takes about fifteen minutes, which I actually enjoy because it is the only part of the day when I am not looking at a screen.

What I do there depends on the day. Most of the time I study; I am preparing for a nursing registration exam as well as IELTS, so I need somewhere without distractions. But at least once a week I leave the textbooks in my bag and just read a novel or sit by the window. The window looks out over a row of old trees, and when it rains the sound on the tiled roof is the best background noise I know.

I like it for a simple reason: nobody expects anything from me there. At home there is always someone calling my name, at the hostel there is always a group chat buzzing, and at college there are deadlines. In that reading room my phone is on silent in my bag, and for two hours my mind slows down. I think everybody needs one place like that, and I was lucky to find mine by accident.

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

I would like to describe the area around the old bus stand in my hometown, Mehsana, in Gujarat. When I was in school, it was the centre of everything, and over the past ten years or so it has become almost unrecognisable.

Before, it was a chaotic but friendly place. There was a row of tea stalls where the drivers sat, a vegetable market that spilled onto the road every morning, and a single-screen cinema that showed one film a week. The buses themselves were old, and the whole place smelt of diesel and fried snacks. Everyone knew the stall owners by name.

The change started when the city built a new bus terminal on the highway and moved all the long-distance services there. The old stand became a parking lot, then a construction site, and now there is a four-storey shopping complex with a food court and a multiplex. The vegetable market was moved into a covered building two streets away, and most of the tea stalls simply disappeared.

My feelings are mixed, honestly. The new complex is cleaner, it is air-conditioned, and my younger cousins love it; they have somewhere to go in the evenings that did not exist for us. But something was lost. The old place was where people met by chance, and the new one is where people go to buy things. My father still refuses to call it anything except "the bus stand", and when I go back I find myself doing the same.

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

The thing I want to talk about is a pair of noise-cancelling headphones that I bought about three months ago. They were not cheap for me, roughly a week's salary, so I thought about it for a long time before I finally ordered them.

I bought them online, from one of the big shopping sites, during a sale in July. I had been reading reviews for weeks and had even gone to a shop in Hyderabad to try two different models, which I think is the right way to do it; you cannot judge headphones from a photograph.

The reason I decided to buy them is that I share a flat with two other people and I work from home three days a week. My flatmates are not noisy by normal standards, but when you are on a call with a client and someone is frying onions and watching a cricket match in the next room, it is very hard to concentrate. I had been using cheap earphones and turning up the volume, which gave me headaches.

I am happy with them for several reasons. The obvious one is that they work: I press a button and the flat goes quiet. But the unexpected benefit is that I now use them for practice, including for this test. I record myself answering questions and listen back, and with good headphones I can actually hear my own pronunciation mistakes, the way I drop the end of words when I speak quickly. So a purchase I made for work has turned into a study tool, and that feels like good value.

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

The piece of technology I find genuinely difficult is the smart television in my parents' living room. It sounds silly, because it is supposed to be simpler than the old one, but every time I visit them I end up holding three remote controls and feeling foolish.

My father bought it about two years ago, during Diwali, mostly because the salesman promised him he could watch his favourite devotional channels and cricket in the same place. I first tried to use it the same evening, and it took me forty minutes to get from the home screen to a live news channel. Every button opened a new menu, and the voice search did not understand my father's accent or mine.

The problems are mostly about the design. There is one remote for the set-top box, one for the television itself and one for the sound bar. Each app has its own login, and the passwords are written on a piece of paper stuck behind the television. When the internet drops, which happens often in their area, half the screen stops working and you cannot even reach the normal channels without switching inputs. My mother has given up completely and watches on her phone.

How do I feel? Mostly frustrated, and a little guilty, because I work in IT and my parents assume I should be able to fix anything with a screen. There is also a bigger feeling, which is that this technology was clearly designed by young people for young people. If I struggle with it, a seventy-year-old in a small town has no chance, and that does not seem fair to me.

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

I would like to talk about the day I was late for my own college admission interview, which is still the most embarrassing morning of my life. This was about five years ago, when I was applying to an engineering college in Coimbatore.

The interview was at ten in the morning in a building on the far side of the city. I had planned to leave at eight, which would have given me plenty of time. But at seven thirty my grandmother had a fall in the bathroom. She was not seriously hurt, but she was shaken, and my parents were both at work, so I had to wait with her until my aunt arrived. By the time I left it was nine fifteen, and there had been an accident on the main road, so the traffic was barely moving. I got out of the auto and ran the last kilometre in formal shoes.

When I arrived, sweating and twenty-five minutes late, the panel had already called the next candidate. The coordinator told me, quite coldly, that latecomers were not usually seen. I explained what had happened, and I think the fact that I was clearly upset helped, because she went inside and came back to say they would see me last, at the end of the session.

I felt a mixture of things. Shame, obviously, because first impressions matter and mine was terrible. But I also felt I had done the right thing by staying with my grandmother, and in the interview itself I actually spoke about it when they asked about handling pressure. I got the place, in the end. Since that day I leave for anything important an hour earlier than I need to.

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

The festival I enjoy most is Onam, which is the harvest festival of Kerala. It falls in the Malayalam month of Chingam, which is usually late August or early September, and it lasts about ten days, although for most families the main celebration is on one day, Thiruvonam.

It is celebrated across Kerala and by Malayali communities everywhere; my cousins in Dubai and Melbourne celebrate it with the same seriousness as we do at home in Kottayam. What is unusual about Onam is that it is not a religious festival in the narrow sense. Everyone in the state joins in, regardless of their religion, which I think is one reason it feels so warm.

What people do is quite specific. Every morning the women and girls make a pookalam, a circular design of fresh flowers, on the floor in front of the house, and it gets bigger and more complicated each day. On Thiruvonam everyone wears new clothes, traditionally white and gold, and the family sits down for the sadya, a vegetarian feast served on a banana leaf with more than twenty dishes. In the towns there are boat races, tug-of-war competitions and a kind of tiger dance called pulikali where men paint their bodies in stripes.

I enjoy it for the food, obviously, but mainly because it is the one time in the year when the whole extended family is in one house. My brother flies in from Bengaluru, my grandmother supervises the kitchen from a chair, and for one day nobody is checking their phone. I have tried to explain Onam to colleagues from other states, and the closest I can get is that it is like Diwali, Thanksgiving and a school sports day happening at once.

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

I want to talk about a time last winter when I helped an elderly man at Delhi railway station who had lost his way. It was not a dramatic situation, but it stayed with me.

I was waiting for a late train to Amritsar, around eleven at night, and I noticed a man of perhaps seventy-five standing near the enquiry counter with a small bag, looking at his ticket and then at the board, again and again. He clearly could not read the English on the display, and the Hindi announcements were impossible to hear over the noise. When I asked him in Punjabi whether he needed help, he looked relieved and told me he was trying to reach his daughter in Ludhiana and that his phone battery had died.

What I did was simple. I checked his ticket, found that his train was leaving from a different platform in twenty minutes, and walked with him across the footbridge, carrying his bag because the stairs were difficult for him. I used my own phone to call his daughter so she knew which coach he was in and when to expect him. Then I waited with him until the train came and made sure he was in the right seat. The whole thing took perhaps thirty minutes, and my own train was late anyway.

Afterwards I felt two things. One was a kind of quiet satisfaction, because it had cost me nothing and clearly mattered to him. The other was a bit of worry, because I kept thinking of my own grandfather travelling alone, and whether anyone would stop for him. The next day his daughter called to thank me, which I had not expected at all. It made me think that most people want to help; they just do not notice.

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

The mistake I would like to describe happened during my first job, about three years ago, when I was working as a junior accountant for a trading company in Surat. I sent a payment to the wrong supplier.

It was a Friday afternoon at the end of the month, which in accounts is the worst possible time. I had a list of about forty payments to process, two suppliers had very similar names, and I was rushing because I wanted to leave on time for a cousin's engagement. I copied the bank details from the wrong row of the spreadsheet and approved a transfer of around two lakh rupees to a company we had stopped working with a year earlier.

The consequences were not as bad as they could have been, but they were bad enough. The real supplier called on Monday asking where the money was. My manager had to phone the other company and request a refund, which took eleven days and several awkward conversations. I was not fired, but I was taken off payment processing for two months, and I had to explain the error in front of the whole finance team.

What I learnt is partly practical and partly about myself. Practically, I now never process a payment without reading the account name aloud, and I never do financial work in a hurry on a Friday. About myself, I learnt that I was more worried about looking competent than about being careful, and that this is a dangerous combination in a job where mistakes are measured in rupees. My manager said something I still remember: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. It sounded like a cliché at the time, and now it is how I work.

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

The conversation I want to describe was with a taxi driver in Manila, about a year ago, and it changed how I think about working abroad.

I was visiting a friend, and on the way from the airport we got stuck in traffic for almost two hours, so we started talking. The driver, who was perhaps fifty, told me he had worked as a welder in Saudi Arabia for twelve years, sent money home every month, and come back to find that his children had grown up without him. He said it calmly, without complaint, but he also said that if he could choose again he would have stayed and earned less.

At the time I was in the middle of applying for jobs in the Gulf myself, because the salary was double what I could earn at home and everyone in my family saw it as the obvious step. I had not really thought about anything except the money. The conversation took place in a hot car on EDSA, which is not where you expect to have an important moment, but I remember exactly where we were when he said, "Money comes back. Years do not."

It changed the way I think in a specific way. I still believe working abroad can be the right decision, and I may still do it; that is partly why I am taking this test. But I now think about it as a trade, not as free money. I ask what I will lose as well as what I will gain, and I have decided that if I go, it will be for a fixed number of years with a plan to return, not an open-ended stay. One conversation with a stranger did more to shape that decision than months of advice from people who loved me.

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

The habit I would like to talk about is walking for thirty minutes every morning before work. It sounds too simple to count as a habit, but for someone who spent the last five years sitting at a desk and then sitting on a sofa, it has been a real change.

I started it in March this year, after a routine health check at my office in Gurugram. The doctor did not say anything dramatic, but my blood pressure was higher than it should be at thirty-one, and my weight had gone up by eight kilograms since college. He did not tell me to join a gym. He said, "Walk. Every day. Before you check your phone." For some reason that instruction was easier to accept than a diet plan.

Keeping it going has required a few tricks. I put my shoes next to the bed so there is no decision to make in the morning. I walk the same route around the park so it has become automatic, and I listen to English podcasts while I walk, which turns the half hour into study time as well. On days when I really do not want to go, I tell myself I only have to walk to the park gate, and once I am there I always carry on. I have missed perhaps ten days in seven months, usually because of travel.

The difference has been bigger than the numbers. My blood pressure is back to normal, which pleased the doctor, and I have lost about four kilos. But the real change is in my mornings. I used to wake up and immediately read work messages, and the day would start with stress. Now the day starts with trees and a podcast, and I arrive at the office already awake. My wife says I am less irritable, which I choose to take as a compliment.

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

I would like to describe a time about six months ago when my phone got me out of a difficult situation in a city I did not know. I had travelled to Jaipur for a job interview, and on the morning of the interview the car I had booked simply did not turn up.

It was about eight in the morning, the interview was at nine thirty across the city, and I was standing outside a guesthouse in a lane that no cab seemed able to find. The driver's number was switched off. I was in formal clothes, it was already hot, and I could feel myself starting to panic, which is the worst thing you can do before an interview.

The phone helped in three separate ways. First, I used the map to work out that the metro station was only a twelve-minute walk away and that the metro would get me within a kilometre of the office, which I had not known. Second, while I was walking, I opened the company's email and found the HR contact's number, called her, and explained that I might be five minutes late; she was very understanding and said she would move me to the second slot. Third, from the metro I booked a bike taxi for the last kilometre, which in Jaipur traffic was the only thing that could have got me there on time. I walked into the building at nine twenty-eight.

How did I feel? Relieved, mainly, and a little proud of myself for not freezing. But I also felt uncomfortable, because I realised how completely dependent I was on one small device. If the battery had been at ten per cent, as it often is, the whole morning would have gone differently. Since then I carry a power bank everywhere, and I always check the route the night before, on paper as well as on the phone.

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

The series I would recommend is a Malayalam-language drama called Kumbalangi Nights, which is actually a film, not a series, so let me correct that. It came out a few years ago and it is set in a fishing village near Kochi.

It is about four brothers who live together in an unfinished house by the backwaters. They do not get along, their parents are gone, and the film follows what happens when the youngest brother falls in love with a girl whose family is very different from theirs. On paper that sounds like an ordinary family drama, but the way it is told is unusual: it is quiet, there is a lot of humour, and the villain of the story is not a criminal but a very polite man who believes he is always right.

I watched it at home, on a streaming service, during the lockdown, and then again with my parents, which is a good test of a film because my father normally falls asleep. He did not. We watched it on a Sunday evening with the subtitles on for my cousin, who does not speak Malayalam, and she enjoyed it as much as we did.

I would recommend it to anyone who thinks Indian cinema is only songs and fights, and especially to friends from outside Kerala. They would enjoy it because the characters feel like real people, the setting is beautiful without being a tourist advertisement, and it says something true about how men in our culture are taught to behave. It is also under two hours, which these days is a recommendation in itself.

Two-minute model talk (written by TalkDrill)

The advertisement I remember best is a television commercial for a brand of tea that ran when I was in school, maybe fifteen years ago. I have seen thousands of adverts since then, but this is the one that stayed.

I saw it on the television in my grandparents' house in Lucknow, during the cricket season, when the same five or six adverts repeated at every break. This one was different because it was longer than usual and it had almost no dialogue.

What happened in it was very simple. An old man who lives alone sits by his window every evening with a cup of tea, and a young boy from the neighbouring flat keeps looking across at him. Slowly, over the course of the advert, the boy starts bringing him a newspaper, then his homework, then one evening he brings his own cup and they drink tea together without saying a word. At the very end there is a line of text saying something like "some conversations do not need words", and then the brand name. That was it. No celebrity, no song, no price.

I remember it for a few reasons. The first is that it made my grandfather cry, which I had never seen before, and he laughed at himself and said it was the onions. The second is that it was the first time I understood that an advertisement could be a story rather than a sales pitch. And the third is that I now work in marketing, and when a client asks for something loud and fast, I sometimes think of that old man by the window. It sold tea, I am sure, but what it really sold was a feeling, and it did it in ninety seconds.