The difficulty has to be real and specific. 'It was hard' is the sentence that caps this card at band 6.
The cue card
Describe something difficult that you succeeded in doing.
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.
easier said than done
for the gap between plan and execution
stick with it
for persistence through the difficult middle
throw in the towel
usually as what you nearly did
a steep learning curve
for rapid difficult learning
push through
for continuing past the low point
it took everything I had
for genuine effort, without overstating
Half the card is the word 'difficult'. Name the specific obstacle and dwell on the point where it nearly beat you.
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 hardest thing I've done is learning to swim properly at twenty-eight, having been genuinely frightened of water since a bad experience as a child. I'd avoided it for two decades and constructed an elaborate set of excuses that I half believed. What made me finally do it was a holiday where everyone else went in and I sat on a beach pretending to read, and I was too old to find that acceptable any more. I found an instructor who taught adults specifically, which mattered — the first four lessons I didn't swim at all, I just stood in shallow water and got used to putting my face in. It took about nine months to be able to do a length without panicking. What made it difficult wasn't physical. It was that every lesson required deciding again to go, and the fear didn't diminish for a long time. I'm not a good swimmer now. But I can, and I no longer arrange my life around not being able to.
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 word is journey, not destination — and the difference is worth a band.
A card built on a fork in the road. If there was no real alternative, pick a different decision.
Cultural detail is free marks here — the examiner may genuinely not know how the occasion works.
A narrative with built-in tension — one of the easiest cards to speak fluently on if you tell it in order.
Mirror image of the person-who-helped-you card, and the same rule applies: build the problem first.
The card rewards process. What you tried and abandoned is worth more than what finally worked.
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.