Modern, easy to talk about, and dangerously easy to answer in generalities about social media.
The cue card
Describe an app on your phone that you use often.
You should say
1 minute to prepare · up to 2 minutes to speak
Four beats, not four answers. The prompts on the card are a scaffold — a turn that flows past them scores better than four disconnected replies.
Lexical resource is a quarter of your band, and band 7 explicitly allows the occasional wrong word — playing it safe with plain vocabulary is what keeps people at 6.
at my fingertips
for instant access
it syncs across my devices
concrete technical detail, precisely used
cut down on
for what it reduced — paper, time, other apps
notifications
and 'I've turned them off', which is a real opinion
intuitive
for design that needs no instruction
a bit of a time sink
for the honest downside
Pick something with a job — maps, banking, a language app, a notes app. Function gives you sentences that opinions about Instagram don't.
Read this to see the moves, not to learn the words. An examiner hears memorised answers every working day and it shows up in your fluency score — the hesitation pattern of someone reciting is nothing like the pattern of someone thinking. The details below are invented; yours should be your own.
The app I use most that isn't a messaging app is a language one — I've been trying to learn Portuguese for about eighteen months with fairly mixed results. I use it every day, generally on the train, in sessions of about ten minutes. What it does well is remove the decision. I don't have to think about what to study, which is the thing that killed every previous attempt I made with books. It just presents the next thing. What it does badly, and I've become quite critical of this, is that it's built to be addictive rather than effective. There's a streak counter and I'm on something like four hundred days, and I'm aware that I sometimes do the minimum to protect the number rather than because I'm learning. That's a design choice, and it's working on me, and knowing it's working doesn't help much. I can read Portuguese reasonably now. I still can't hold a conversation, which tells you something.
Part 3 is loosely tied to your long turn, but the questions turn abstract — about people in general rather than about you. This card usually leads into:
The temptation is to name your phone and stop. The card rewards anything more specific.
The object matters less than the relationship behind it, and the best answers know that early.
Recent means you have real detail available — use it, because vagueness here is obvious.
A card that needs physical description, which is exactly the vocabulary most candidates haven't rehearsed.
You describe two things here — the image, and the moment it froze. Most candidates only do one.
A process card. The sequence of making is the structure, which makes this one of the easier cards to fill.
Oliver will read you a card, wait out your preparation minute, and then say nothing at all for two minutes — which is the part you cannot rehearse alone. The report afterwards scores fluency, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation separately. The first test is free.
This guide is written from the publicly published IELTS Speaking band descriptors, in our own words. For the official wording, see the British Council's band descriptors. MockLive AI is an independent practice tool and is not affiliated with IELTS, the British Council, IDP or Cambridge Assessment English.