Describe a piece of technology you find useful

IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe a piece of technology you find useful. 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 piece of technology is a wider category than the default answer suggests, and the default answer is a smartphone. It is allowed, and it is difficult, because a phone does everything and a description of everything becomes a list — calls, maps, payments, alarms, photographs — that spends ninety seconds saying nothing about you. Narrower objects hold two minutes more comfortably: a washing machine, a pressure cooker, an air conditioner in a city that needs one, a laptop that has survived four years of coursework, the app your whole family uses to send money. When you started using it is the bullet that opens up comparison — what the same job took before, what changed in the house, who refused to touch it at first. The follow-up about older relatives is a signal about where the examiner expects the interesting part to be.