Describe a place near water that you have visited
IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe a place near water that you have visited. 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.
Water moves while you are describing it, which helps at the ninety-second mark when the adjectives have run out. A current, a ferry crossing, someone washing clothes at the edge, the sound changing when the wind picks up — the place keeps generating detail on your behalf. The final bullet asks why you remember it, which is a lower bar than why you loved it and a more interesting one: a day that went wrong qualifies, and so does somewhere you were taken once as a child and have never been back to. The examiner then asks whether you would like to live near water, so what you say about one afternoon should leave you something to say about a lifetime.
Angles worth taking
- Anchor when you went — the month, the year you were in, what else was happening that week.
- What you did there is a bullet for verbs: swam, argued, sat on the wall, missed the boat.
- Weather is not filler on this card; a grey river and a bright one are different places.
- Describe the last stretch of getting there, including the moment the water first came into view.
- If tourists go there, say who else was around and how their presence changed it for you.
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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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