Describe some useful advice you were given

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. 01The situation you were in when you got it.
2. 02Who gave it and what they actually said — the words, as closely as you remember.
3. 03What you thought of it at the time, which is often not much.
4. 04How it proved useful later, with an instance.

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 most useful advice I've been given came from a former manager and it was extremely short: never send the email you write when you're angry, but do write it. I'd been about to reply to something that had annoyed me and she suggested writing the reply and then not sending it for an hour. What's clever about it is that it doesn't ask you to be calm, which is not a thing you can do on demand. It gives the anger somewhere to go and then puts a gap in. I've used it a great deal since, and the hit rate is striking — I'd say I send perhaps one in five of those drafts, usually heavily rewritten, and I've never once regretted the four I didn't. The wider version, which took me longer to see, is that most bad decisions I've made were made quickly while feeling something strongly. The advice isn't really about email. It's about putting a delay between a feeling and an action.

What earns the band

• Explaining why the advice works — it doesn't require being calm — is more valuable than the advice itself and shows real analysis.
• 'One in five... and I've never once regretted the four' is a concrete, quantified account of following it.
• The generalisation at the end lifts the answer from an anecdote to a principle, which is the Part 3 register arriving early.

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:

• whether people generally take advice they are given
• who young people turn to for guidance
• the difference between advice and instruction

How to handle the Part 3 discussion

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