Describe a place you visited that was full of people
IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe a place you visited that was full of people. 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 crowd is something you experience mainly by being blocked. You could not see the front. You could not hear the announcement the second time. You moved at the speed of whoever was ahead of you and came out somewhere you had not planned to be. That is a description most candidates never give, because the venue is easier to reach for — how big it was, how hot, how far from the station — and that is material any place card would take. The people are what make this one specific: what the man beside you was shouting about, who was sitting on the ground while everybody else stood, which family had brought a child and how they were managing. A crowd is made of individuals, and you can only describe the ones you actually looked at.
Angles worth taking
- Pick three people you can still picture and let them stand for the whole crowd.
- Say how the crowd behaved as one body: where it stopped, where it surged, where it thinned.
- Sound and smell hold a crowded place better than size does — announcements, whistles, generators, frying oil.
- Mixed feelings are a real answer here: excited for the first hour, finished with it by the third.
- Give your reason for going in one sentence, then spend the time on what you found there.
- Say what you could not do there: sit down, find your friends, get a signal, leave when you wanted.
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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
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