Describe a friend you have known for a long time
IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe a friend you have known for a long time. 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.
This card makes you move through time. How you first met is past narrative, what you do together is habitual present, and the closing instruction — why the friendship has lasted — asks for a claim that covers the whole span. An answer parked in one tense sounds thin even when the vocabulary is strong, and the join between the meeting and now is where people either compress a decade into a single sentence or linger far too long on the first day of school. Duration also needs evidence. Something must have tested it: a move to another city, different colleges, months without messaging, an argument that survived. Naming one of those gives the final bullet something to explain, and the follow-up about the next twenty years then has somewhere to go.
Angles worth taking
- Give the meeting a place and a rough date, then jump forward instead of narrating every year in between.
- The lasting question needs a cause: distance survived, a habit kept up, or interests that changed in step.
- One shared routine described concretely beats three adjectives about how close the two of you are.
- Mention a gap or a strain, because a friendship without friction leaves the final bullet nothing to explain.
- Avoid the childhood-friend clichés — inseparable, like brothers — and give one exchange from the last month instead.
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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.
More IELTS Speaking tests
All IELTS Speaking tests · People tests · All speaking practice