Describe someone you know who has moved to another city or country

Intermediate

8 min

IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe someone you know who has moved to another city or country. 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.

Watch where the two minutes go on this one. The journey, the paperwork and the reasons for leaving can absorb the whole turn, and the instruction that actually carries the answer — how the move changed their life — arrives with seconds to spare. A change needs two states to compare, so the preparation worth doing is not a list of facts about the destination but a before and an after: what their days looked like then, what they look like now. It is also somebody else’s story. You are reporting on a cousin, a school friend, a colleague who transferred, so hedged language does real work here — as far as I know, from what she tells me, apparently. The second follow-up turns the card onto you and asks whether you would move abroad yourself, so there is no need to spend your two minutes arguing your own case.

Angles worth taking

Sketch their life before the move in a line or two, so the change afterwards has a baseline.
Keep the reasons brief — work, marriage, a course, family — and give the consequences the bulk of the time.
Use reported speech and hedges, since most of what you know arrived second-hand through calls and messages.
Mention something that got harder as well as better; one-sided accounts run out of material quickly.
Say when they left and whether they have been back since; a move made last year reads differently from one made a decade ago.

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The format

Parts covered

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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