The most grammatically demanding narrative card — it needs past, past perfect and present in one answer.
The cue card
Describe a time you changed your mind about something.
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.
I used to be convinced that
sets up the former position cleanly
have second thoughts
for the beginning of doubt
come round to
the exact phrasal verb for gradually accepting a view
see it from their side
for perspective-taking
eat my words
idiomatic for admitting you were wrong
with the benefit of hindsight
formal retrospective framing
'I had always assumed…', 'I've since realised…' — this card is set precisely to see whether you can move between tenses. Use them.
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 clearest example is that I was firmly against remote working before 2020, and I'd argued about it with people repeatedly. My position was that teams need to be in a room, that you lose the incidental conversations, and that people would slack off. I was quite confident about it, which is the embarrassing part. What changed my mind wasn't an argument. It was simply doing it for two years and finding that most of what I'd predicted didn't happen. The incidental conversations turned out to be genuinely valuable and also genuinely replaceable if you're deliberate about it. The slacking off didn't materialise; if anything the problem went the other way. What I find interesting looking back is that I had no real evidence for the original view — I'd absorbed it from people I respected and then defended it as if it were mine. I've tried since to notice when I'm doing that, though I suspect I mostly don't. It's much easier to spot in other people.
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:
The word is journey, not destination — and the difference is worth a band.
A card built on a fork in the road. If there was no real alternative, pick a different decision.
Cultural detail is free marks here — the examiner may genuinely not know how the occasion works.
A narrative with built-in tension — one of the easiest cards to speak fluently on if you tell it in order.
Mirror image of the person-who-helped-you card, and the same rule applies: build the problem first.
The card rewards process. What you tried and abandoned is worth more than what finally worked.
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.