Describe a place you would like to visit in the future

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.

1. 01Where, and how long you've wanted to go — the 'how you heard about it' bullet.
2. 02What put it in your head: a film, a photograph, someone who went.
3. 03What you'd do there, in order, as a plan rather than a wish list.
4. 04Why it's still on the list — what's stopped you so far, and when you think you'll go.

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.

The trap on this card

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 place I most want to go is Japan, specifically outside the big cities — I'd want to spend most of the time in smaller towns rather than doing Tokyo and Kyoto in a week. The reason is slightly unusual. I've become interested in the way things are repaired there, this idea that a mended object can be more valuable than an intact one, and I'd like to see whether that's a real attitude you can feel in ordinary places or mainly something that gets exported. I'd want to go in autumn, partly for the obvious reason and partly because I don't cope with heat. I'd travel by train and I'd want to go alone, or at most with one person, because I know I'd want to stop constantly. What's stopping me is money and, honestly, a slight fear that I've built it up too much in my head. That's happened to me before with places.

What earns the band

• The whole answer is hypothetical and sustains it without a single slip — 'I'd want', 'I'd travel', 'I'd have' — which is the real difficulty of this card.
• The reason for going is unusual and specific, so the answer cannot be confused with the generic travel response every examiner hears daily.
• Admitting an unflattering reason at the end — fear of disappointment — is the sort of honesty that reads as unrehearsed thought.

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 people travel abroad
• whether travel changes the way people think
• the environmental cost of tourism

How to handle the Part 3 discussion

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