The card most likely to be answered in the abstract, which is exactly what loses marks in Part 2.
The cue card
Describe a person you think is a good leader.
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.
lead by example
the core idiom for this card
take responsibility when things go wrong
distinguishes leaders from managers
command respect
note it's earned, not demanded — useful nuance
listen to the room
a modern, natural phrase for reading a group
make the unpopular call
for difficult decisions
delegate
precise vocabulary examiners notice
Part 2 wants one person, described. Save the general theory — the examiner will ask for it in Part 3 anyway.
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.
I'd like to talk about someone I worked under rather than someone famous — a project manager called Farah at a company I joined about four years ago. The team was in a bad state when she arrived. The previous manager had been the sort who took credit upwards and blame downwards, and morale was on the floor. What she did in the first month was almost entirely listening. She had a conversation with every single person, including the contractors, and she didn't announce a plan until she'd finished. I remember being sceptical about that at the time — it looked like indecision. It wasn't. When the plan came it was specific, and crucially it named things that were going to be dropped, which nobody had been willing to do. I think the quality that made her good was a willingness to be unpopular in a precise way. Weak managers are unpopular by accident. She chose exactly which fights to have and then held the position, and the team trusted her because of it, not in spite of it.
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 most common Part 2 card there is, and the one most often answered with a list of adjectives instead of a story.
A card that rewards specific life detail — the era someone lived through is free material most candidates leave on the table.
A narrative card disguised as a person card — the marks are in the situation, not the description.
One of the few cards where you can prepare real content in advance without it sounding memorised.
The 'how you met' bullet is the story engine here — most people rush it and then run dry.
A card that hands you an entire vocabulary field — work, skill, standards — if you pick someone whose job you can actually describe.
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.