Describe a place you have visited

Intermediate

8 min

IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe a place you have visited that you found interesting.

An intermediate-level session of about 8 minutes. Covers Parts 2, 3. 7 prompts in total.

“You’ll have one minute to think about what you’re going to say, and you can make some notes if you wish.” Then the examiner stops talking, and that minute turns out to be much shorter than it sounds. Write nouns, not sentences — six or seven words you can glance down at. Anything longer gets read aloud, and reading aloud always sounds flat. The harder problem with a place is that nothing happens in it. A person does things; a building simply stands there, and once you have covered what it looked like you have nowhere left to go. So walk through it in time — how you got there, what you saw first, where you ended up sitting, what you did before leaving. A sequence pulls tenses in on its own, and it gives you a second half you did not have to invent.

Angles worth taking

Give the visit a before and an after — what you expected on the way there, what you said afterwards.
If a word will not come, go the long way round it: the place where they sell the tickets.
Put people into it — who took you, who complained about the walk, who you would not bring back.
Somewhere you have been twice gives you a comparison built in: what had changed between the first visit and the last.
Your own small numbers hold up under pressure — how long the walk was, how early you arrived, how many went.

Who is in the room

You play

An IELTS candidate giving a long turn

You speak with

An IELTS examiner conducting Part 2

Phrases to reach for

These are shown to you before the session starts. They are what you are asked to use, not a list the scorer is checking off.

I would like to talk about

What struck me the most was

The atmosphere was

I would definitely recommend

Looking back, I feel

Ready to speak?

Free to start. You need a TalkDrill account to speak — reading this page does not.

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The format

Parts covered

2, 3

Prompts in total

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.

Your objective

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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