Two stories in one — the object's and the family's — which is why this card rarely runs short.
The cue card
Describe an object that has been in your family for a long time.
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.
hand down
the exact verb for passing through generations
an heirloom
the precise noun, and few candidates use it
it's seen better days
idiomatic for worn condition
it's been in the family for
the natural construction for duration
of no great value
the useful contrast: worthless and priceless at once
a link to
for connection with people you never met
Money is the least interesting thing about it. The card wants to know why the family kept it — that answer is about people.
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 object I'd describe is my grandfather's watch, which my father has and which will presumably come to me at some point, though we've never discussed it and I'd rather not. It's a mechanical watch from the fifties, gold-plated with most of the plating worn off the back where it sat against his wrist for forty years. It doesn't keep good time. It loses about four minutes a day, which makes it useless as a watch and is somehow the detail I find most affecting — the wear is the record of the wearing. My grandfather was a railway clerk and the watch was bought with his first proper salary, which in that job and that decade would have been a very deliberate purchase. I met him only a few times before he died. What the object does is give me something specific to attach to a person I mostly know through other people's stories, and that turns out to matter more than I'd have predicted.
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.