Describe a quiet place you like to go to
IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe a quiet place you like to go to. 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.
There is an odd demand buried in this one: you have to speak without stopping about somewhere whose main quality is the absence of sound. The closing instruction is narrower than it first looks — explain why you like it to be quiet, not why you like the place — so the quiet itself has to be the subject, and the way to give it substance is to say what the silence makes possible. Reading without going back over the same line four times. A phone call you can actually hear. Thinking a decision through to the end. The card also asks how often you go there, which quietly converts a mood into a routine, and routines are built from specifics you already know.
Angles worth taking
- Describe the quiet through what you can still hear: a ceiling fan, distant traffic, pages, one person coughing.
- Attach the explanation to an activity the silence allows, not to the place being generally pleasant.
- Say whether the quiet is reliable or a matter of luck, because that is part of why you go.
- Fix the hour you go as well as how often, since the same room is not quiet all day.
- Contrast it with one noisy place you also use; a preference is easier to explain against something.
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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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