Describe an interesting piece of news you read or heard about
Choose something you actually understood. A story you half-followed will strand you at ninety seconds.
The cue card
Describe an interesting piece of news you read or heard about.
You should say
- what the news was
- where you came across it
- who you discussed it with
- and explain why it interested you
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.
- What the story was, in two sentences.
- Where you came across it and what made you stop on it.
- The detail that made it interesting, specifically.
- Who you talked about it with, and where the story went afterwards.
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.
it made the headlines
for prominent coverage
it caught my eye
for what drew you to it
break
as in 'the story broke last week' — precise news verb
coverage
for the reporting as distinct from the events
a mixed reaction
for divided public response
it's still unfolding
for an ongoing story
The trap on this card
Choosing a political story you have strong feelings about and losing the thread.
Pick something you can explain calmly and completely. Fluency collapses fastest when you're arguing rather than describing.
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.
The piece of news I'd talk about is a local story rather than an international one — the closure of the swimming pool in the town where I grew up, which was announced about eight months ago. It isn't important by any objective measure. No one outside the town would report it. But it was the only pool for about fifteen miles, it's where essentially everyone I knew learned to swim, and the council closed it because the roof needed replacing and the money wasn't there. I heard about it from my mother on the phone. What struck me was my own reaction, which was disproportionate — I hadn't been in that building for fifteen years and I was genuinely upset. I think what you're actually mourning in those situations isn't the building. It's the confirmation that the place you're from is continuing to change without you, which is obvious and somehow still lands badly. There's a campaign to reopen it. I've donated and I'm not optimistic.
What earns the band
- Choosing small local news over an obvious global story is a distinctive decision that produces a much more personal answer.
- 'Continuing to change without you' names something specific and slightly uncomfortable, which is the strongest part of the answer.
- 'I've donated and I'm not optimistic' ends flatly and honestly, avoiding a false uplift.
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 people get their news today
- whether news reporting is objective
- the spread of false information online
Other media & culture cards
Describe a film you enjoyed watching.
Same discipline as the book card — plot summary is the trap, response is the answer.
Describe a song or piece of music you like.
Music is hard to describe and that's the opportunity — most candidates give up and talk about the artist instead.
Describe a website you use often.
Pick one with a purpose. 'Google' and 'YouTube' are the answers that give you least to say.
Describe a television programme you like.
Series give you more material than films — format, running length, how it changed over time.
Describe a podcast or radio programme you listen to.
An audio card, which means the when matters more than for any other media topic — listening is something you do while doing something else.
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.