Small, ordinary and often underestimated — which makes it a good card for showing you can build from little.
The cue card
Describe a shop you enjoy going to.
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.
browse
the exact verb for looking without buying
well stocked
collocation for good range
a bargain
and 'a steal' if you want something stronger
stumble across
for finding something unexpected — the reason physical shops survive
pop in
for a short, casual visit
they know what I like
shows a relationship in five words
The card asks why you *enjoy* going. The answer is usually about the experience of being in the shop — say that.
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 shop I enjoy most is a second-hand bookshop near the station that is, frankly, badly organised. There's a nominal system by subject and it collapses about a metre into each shelf. The owner is an elderly man who reads behind the counter and doesn't look up unless you ask him something, at which point he's extremely helpful and then goes straight back to his book. I go perhaps twice a month. What I enjoy is precisely the disorganisation. In a normal bookshop you find what you went in for. In this one you can't, so you come out with something you'd never heard of, which is how I've found most of the books I actually care about. It's cheap too — nothing is priced above a few pounds — and there's a box outside that's always fifty pence. I've stopped going in with an intention. I go in with twenty minutes and see what happens, and that's a different kind of shopping entirely.
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:
A description card where the marks come from the atmosphere, not the floor plan.
A sensory card. The crowd itself is the subject, and describing it well is most of the score.
The mirror of the crowded-place card, and harder — you have to describe an absence.
Broad enough that the risk is a shapeless list of sights rather than a shortage of material.
The card that most rewards actual descriptive vocabulary — shape, material, scale, age.
An easy card to answer adequately and a hard one to answer memorably — the difference is season and time of day.
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.