Works equally well for someone who plays badly — how you started and why you continue is the material.
The cue card
Describe a sport or physical activity you enjoy.
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.
get into
the standard phrasal verb for taking up an activity
keep fit
British collocation, more natural than 'stay in shape'
out of breath
concrete physical detail
a bit rusty
for skills gone stale — honest and idiomatic
clear my head
the most common real reason people exercise
I'm no good at it, but
disarming, natural, and lets you continue honestly
The examiner isn't learning the game. Describe doing it — the effort, the routine, the people — which is what the card asks.
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 sport I do is climbing, indoors mostly, which I started about five years ago because a friend needed someone to go with and I was too polite to refuse. I go twice a week to a place about fifteen minutes from my flat. What I like about it, and this took me a while to work out, is that it's the only exercise I do where I'm not counting. Running I find tedious because I'm always aware of how far is left. Climbing is a series of problems, and you're thinking about where your left foot goes, and forty minutes disappear. It's also unusually sociable for something you do alone — you end up in conversation with strangers about a particular route, and there's no expectation beyond that. I'm not good, incidentally. I've plateaued at a fairly moderate grade for two years and I've made peace with it. I'm there for the ninety minutes of not thinking about anything else.
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 future card, so the grammar is conditional — and the plan needs to be plausible, not aspirational.
'Recently' is the operative word — it means you can talk about being a beginner, which is more interesting than expertise.
Process, sense and culture in one card. The risk is reciting a recipe rather than describing a meal.
Needs a contrast to work — what you're relaxing *from* gives the answer somewhere to start.
Repetition is the subject. Describing something you've done four hundred times needs a different approach from a one-off trip.
Honesty scores here. An answer about something you manage three times a week beats an invented daily regime.
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.