Describe a website you use often
Pick one with a purpose. 'Google' and 'YouTube' are the answers that give you least to say.
The cue card
Describe a website you use often.
You should say
- what it is
- how you found it
- what you use it for
- and explain why you keep using it
1 minute to prepare · up to 2 minutes to speak
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.
- What the site is and what it's for.
- How you found it and how long you've used it.
- What you specifically do on it — actions, not categories.
- What you'd lose if it disappeared tomorrow.
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.
a wealth of information
collocation for a rich resource
easy to navigate
precise for good site design
I've bookmarked it
concrete evidence of frequent use
reliable
and 'take it with a pinch of salt' for the opposite
a rabbit hole
for sites that pull you in — vivid and current
my go-to for
for the first place you look
The trap on this card
Naming a search engine and describing searching.
Pick something narrow — a recipe site, a forum, a news outlet, a language resource. Specific sites have specific features to describe.
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 site I use most that isn't work or social is a recipe site that has no advertising, no life story before the recipe, and no video, which in the current internet makes it feel almost illicit. It's run by one person as far as I can tell. I use it perhaps three times a week. What makes it good is entirely what it doesn't do. Most recipe sites are optimised to keep you scrolling, so there's a thousand words about the author's grandmother before you find out how much flour you need, and I've come to find that genuinely infuriating when I'm standing in a kitchen with wet hands. This one gives you the ingredients, then the method, and stops. The recipes are also reliable, which sounds basic and is surprisingly rare — I've cooked maybe forty of them and had two failures, both mine. I'd happily pay for it and there's no way to, which slightly worries me about how long it'll last.
What earns the band
- The argument is built on absence — what the site does not do — which is an unusual and effective structure.
- 'Standing in a kitchen with wet hands' is the concrete detail that makes an abstract complaint land.
- 'I'd happily pay for it and there's no way to' is a natural closing observation with a note of genuine concern.
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:
- how the internet has changed how people find information
- whether online information can be trusted
- who should regulate what appears online
Other media & culture cards
Describe a film you enjoyed watching.
Same discipline as the book card — plot summary is the trap, response is the answer.
Describe a song or piece of music you like.
Music is hard to describe and that's the opportunity — most candidates give up and talk about the artist instead.
Describe a television programme you like.
Series give you more material than films — format, running length, how it changed over time.
Describe an interesting piece of news you read or heard about.
Choose something you actually understood. A story you half-followed will strand you at ninety seconds.
Describe a podcast or radio programme you listen to.
An audio card, which means the when matters more than for any other media topic — listening is something you do while doing something else.
Speak this one out loud
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 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 University Press & Assessment.