Describe a journey that did not go as planned
IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe a journey that did not go as planned. 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.
Most people already have this story, and that is the difficulty. A story told many times comes out compressed, the way you would tell it to a friend who knows the ending, the train was late, we somehow reached, it was a mess. Unpacking it means slowing down at the joins: the train had already left when we got to the station, we were still waiting when the announcement came, by the time we arrived the function was over. The other trouble is the tangle, several things going wrong at once and arriving out of order, so the listener loses the thread. One failure, followed all the way through to how you dealt with it, fills more time than four of them listed.
Angles worth taking
- Anchor it first: where you were going, why, and what depended on your arriving on time.
- Keep to one failure, such as a missed connection or a cancelled booking, and let it change the plan.
- Say what you could not do at the time: no signal, no money left, no other train that night.
- Give the people with you a role, since travelling with parents, friends or strangers changes your options.
- Spend the closing stretch on the fix, because the card asks how you dealt with it.
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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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