Describe a friend you have known for a long time
The 'how you met' bullet is the story engine here — most people rush it and then run dry.
The cue card
Describe a friend you have known for a long time.
You should say
- who they are
- how you met
- what you usually do together
- and explain why the friendship has lasted
1 minute to prepare · up to 2 minutes to speak
How to fill the two minutes
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.
- How you met, told properly, with the setting. This can take thirty seconds on its own.
- What you had in common then, and what you have in common now — the contrast is the interesting part.
- One thing you always do together, described as a habit rather than a single event.
- Why it lasted, when so many friendships from that time didn't.
Vocabulary this card invites
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.
hit it off
for an immediate connection when you first met
go way back
the natural idiom for a long friendship
drift apart
useful as a contrast — what didn't happen to you two
pick up where we left off
for friendships that survive long gaps
have my back
informal but well-judged for loyalty
we've grown in different directions
an honest note that adds credibility
The trap on this card
Listing their good qualities: kind, funny, generous, loyal.
Adjective lists are the lowest-scoring sentence type in Part 2. Replace each one with a two-second example.
A band 8 answer, and why it works
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.
My oldest friend is Priya, who I met on the first day of secondary school when we were both eleven, so that's coming up on twenty years now. We were put next to each other alphabetically, which is a fairly thin basis for a friendship, but it stuck. What's kept it going, I think, is that we've never been in competition. We went in completely different directions — she studied medicine and I went into software — so there's never been a moment where one of us was measuring themselves against the other. I've watched that ruin friendships between people who were closer than us to begin with. We don't actually speak that often now. She's in Bangalore, I'm here, and there are stretches of two or three months where we don't talk at all. But it doesn't seem to matter. The last time I saw her we picked up mid-argument about something from years ago, which is probably the truest test of it. I'd trust her with more or less anything.
What earns the band
- 'A fairly thin basis for a friendship, but it stuck' — dry understatement is a marker of genuine fluency and almost never survives memorisation.
- It develops a claim across the answer rather than listing qualities: why the friendship lasted, evidence, and a test of it at the end.
- Comfortable with the passage of time — 'coming up on twenty years', 'stretches of two or three months' — which naturally pulls in the tense variety examiners are listening for.
What Part 3 asks next
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:
- how friendships change as people get older
- whether online friendships are as real as offline ones
- the difference between friends and family
Other people cards
Describe a person who has had an important influence on your life.
The most common Part 2 card there is, and the one most often answered with a list of adjectives instead of a story.
Describe an older person you admire.
A card that rewards specific life detail — the era someone lived through is free material most candidates leave on the table.
Describe a person who helped you with something.
A narrative card disguised as a person card — the marks are in the situation, not the description.
Describe a famous person from your country.
One of the few cards where you can prepare real content in advance without it sounding memorised.
Describe someone you know who is very good at their job.
A card that hands you an entire vocabulary field — work, skill, standards — if you pick someone whose job you can actually describe.
Describe a teacher who influenced you.
Close cousin of the influential-person card, but the classroom setting gives you concrete scenes for free.
Speak this one out loud
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 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 University Press & Assessment.