A card that hands you an entire vocabulary field — work, skill, standards — if you pick someone whose job you can actually describe.
The cue card
Describe someone you know who is very good at their job.
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.
know the job inside out
for deep familiarity
an eye for detail
the standard collocation for precision work
keep a cool head
for competence under pressure
make it look effortless
the sign of real skill, and a strong sentence to use
go the extra mile
common but well-placed on this card
set the standard for
elevates the description from personal to professional
Pick the job you can explain, not the person you like most. Fluency here depends entirely on having material.
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 describe a woman called Anita who runs the small bakery at the end of my road. Calling her good at her job undersells it slightly, because what she's good at isn't only baking. She knows perhaps two hundred regular customers by name and, more impressively, by order — you walk in and the bread is already being wrapped. I've watched her handle a queue of fifteen people on a Saturday morning without anyone feeling rushed, which I think is a genuine skill and not a small one. The baking is obviously excellent, but plenty of places produce good bread. What she's actually built is somewhere people want to stand in a queue. I only really understood how deliberate it was when she was ill for a fortnight and her nephew covered. Same recipes, same oven, and the whole thing felt flat. It made me realise how much of a business can sit in one person's manner, which is not something you can write down and hand over.
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.
Close cousin of the influential-person card, but the classroom setting gives you concrete scenes for free.
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.