Describe a building you find interesting
IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe a building you find interesting. One minute to prepare, up to two minutes to speak, then follow-up questions.
An intermediate-level session of about 8 minutes. Covers Part 2. 3 prompts in total.
A building is too big to take in at once, so the description needs an order, and the order is what usually goes missing. People jump from the dome to the year it was built to the traffic outside and back to the dome again. Choose a path and stay on it: what you see from the road, what changes as you get closer, what is at the entrance, what is round the back. What it is used for is the bullet that brings in people, hours, queues and money, and it keeps producing material after the adjectives have run out. Where it is and what it looks like empty faster than anyone expects — there are only so many ways to say tall, old and white. Pick the building you know something about, not the one that photographs best.
Angles worth taking
- Say what stands next to it; contrast produces adjectives that a single building on its own will not.
- Name the material — sandstone, glass, corrugated sheet — instead of another round of big and beautiful.
- Say which part you would show a visitor first, and which part you would tell them to ignore.
- If you have never been inside, say so plainly and describe the people going in and out instead.
- Age and use often disagree, and the mismatch is interesting: a colonial post office, a temple with shops in its wall.
- Give the size in something a listener can measure: floors, minutes to walk round it, how far off it is visible.
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Browse all IELTS Speaking testsThe format
Parts covered
2
Prompts in total
3
Modes
Learn (guided) · Mock (exam-real)
How a IELTS Speaking session works
Part 1 — the warm-up
Familiar questions about you: work, home, routines. Short answers, but not one-word ones. The examiner is calibrating to your voice.
Part 2 — the cue card
A topic card with prompts, one minute of prep with notes, then up to two minutes speaking without interruption.
Part 3 — the discussion
Abstract follow-ups on the Part 2 theme. Opinions, comparisons and speculation, where the higher bands are decided.
Your band estimate
A score on each of the four official criteria, what pulled it down, and the habit to change before you sit the real test.
What you're scored on
IELTS Speaking is marked on four criteria of equal weight. The estimate reports each one separately, because they rarely move together.
Speak for 1-2 minutes with clear structure and descriptive language.
Fluency and coherence
Whether you keep going, and whether the ideas connect. Hesitation while you search for a word costs less than hesitation while you search for a thought.
Lexical resource
Range and precision, including whether you can paraphrase around a word you do not have instead of stopping at it.
Grammatical range and accuracy
Variety of structures as well as correctness. All-simple-sentences and all-accurate caps out around band 6.
Pronunciation
Intelligibility, stress and intonation. Accent is not penalised; flat stress and swallowed word endings are.
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