Music is hard to describe and that's the opportunity — most candidates give up and talk about the artist instead.
The cue card
Describe a song or piece of music you like.
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.
catchy
for a tune that stays with you
upbeat
and 'melancholy' as its opposite — both precise
the chorus kicks in
concrete, idiomatic description of structure
it takes me back to
for music tied to a period of your life
on repeat
for obsessive listening
it gives me goosebumps
physical response, more vivid than 'I love it'
Describe the sound. Tempo, instruments, the moment it changes — that's the descriptive vocabulary the card is testing.
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 song I'd choose is one my father used to play on Sunday mornings when I was young — an old ghazal, sung by a man whose voice sounds like he's been awake for three days. I couldn't understand most of the words at the time; the Urdu is fairly literary and mine was and is domestic. What I responded to was entirely the sound of it. I've since looked up the lyrics properly and they're about loss in a way that would have meant nothing to me at eight. That's the interesting part, actually. I liked it for one reason as a child and I like it for a completely different reason now, and it's the same three minutes. I put it on rarely, because it's tied so specifically to that flat and that time of the week that it has an effect out of proportion to a song. My father is still alive, I should say. It's not that kind of memory. It's just gone.
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:
Same discipline as the book card — plot summary is the trap, response is the answer.
Pick one with a purpose. 'Google' and 'YouTube' are the answers that give you least to say.
Series give you more material than films — format, running length, how it changed over time.
Choose something you actually understood. A story you half-followed will strand you at ninety seconds.
An audio card, which means the *when* matters more than for any other media topic — listening is something you do while doing something else.
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.