Describe a person who has had a big influence on your life
IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe a person who has had a big influence on your life. 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.
Influence is the word the whole card rests on, and it is not the same as admiration. Someone can be impressive without having changed how you behave, and the last line asks for the change: how they have influenced your life. The three bullets — who the person is, how you know them, what they have done — are quick to answer, and they can quietly swallow both minutes, leaving the influence as a rushed closing sentence. A workable shape gives the person forty seconds and spends the rest on the difference they made. Name a habit, a decision, a subject you picked, an attitude you dropped. The rounding-off questions show where the examiner’s attention sits: asking whether you still see this person often pulls the answer into the present tense, and asking whether other people admire them too moves it from your private view to a public one.
Angles worth taking
- Pick someone whose effect on you can be pointed at, rather than the most impressive person you happen to know.
- Spend under a minute on who they are; the demand that carries the card is the change they caused.
- One decision you took because of them does more work than a list of their admirable qualities.
- Say when the influence started and whether it still holds, since the examiner asks about the present afterwards.
- If the person is a relative, watch for the answer drifting into a description of the whole family.
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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