Describe a park or garden you like
An easy card to answer adequately and a hard one to answer memorably — the difference is season and time of day.
The cue card
Describe a park or garden you like.
You should say
- where it is
- how often you visit
- what you can see and do there
- and explain why you enjoy it
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.
- Where it is and how big, relative to something the examiner can picture.
- What's in it — trees, water, paths, playgrounds — and how it changes across the year.
- Who uses it and when, since a park at eight on a Sunday is a different place from six on a weekday.
- What you go there for, and why not somewhere else.
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.
well kept
the natural collocation for maintained grounds
green space
the term used in urban planning — precise register
come into bloom
for seasonal change, and a phrase few candidates reach for
shade
concrete and often overlooked: 'somewhere to sit in the shade'
a breath of fresh air
literal here, which makes it work
the far end
lets you move around the space rather than describing it statically
The trap on this card
A static list of contents — there are trees, there is a lake, there are benches.
Move through it. 'If you come in from the north gate…' turns an inventory into a walk, and walks have sentences.
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.
There's a botanical garden about half an hour from where I live that I've been going to since I was small, first with my grandmother and now mostly on my own. It's not large by the standards of these places, but it's very old — parts of it were planted in the 1840s — and there are trees in it that were saplings when nobody in my family was in this country yet. That's the thing I like about it. It operates on a completely different timescale from everything else in my week. There's a glasshouse at the far end that's kept unpleasantly humid for the tropical plants, and going in there in February when it's freezing outside is one of the small genuine pleasures of my year. My grandmother used to name everything for me, and I've forgotten almost all of it, which I feel slightly guilty about. I go about once a month. It's the one place where I don't mind being on my own for a few hours.
What earns the band
- The timescale idea — trees older than the family's presence in the country — gives an ordinary subject unexpected depth.
- 'Unpleasantly humid' and 'small genuine pleasures' show precise, unexaggerated word choice, which examiners rate above inflated adjectives.
- Sustained past-and-present movement across the answer, from the grandmother to the present-day monthly visit, without any tense slipping.
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:
- why green space matters in cities
- whether people spend enough time outdoors
- how public parks should be funded and maintained
Other places cards
Describe a place you like to spend your free time.
A description card where the marks come from the atmosphere, not the floor plan.
Describe a crowded place you have been to.
A sensory card. The crowd itself is the subject, and describing it well is most of the score.
Describe a quiet place you like to go to.
The mirror of the crowded-place card, and harder — you have to describe an absence.
Describe a city you have visited.
Broad enough that the risk is a shapeless list of sights rather than a shortage of material.
Describe a building you find interesting.
The card that most rewards actual descriptive vocabulary — shape, material, scale, age.
Describe a café or restaurant you like going to.
Food, atmosphere and habit all in one card — no shortage of material, so the risk is drift.
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.