Speaking Part 2Target band 7
Cue card
Describe a person who has had an influence on you.
You should say:
- who the person is
- how you know them
- what they did
and explain how this person has influenced you.
Task
Choose someone you can describe concretely. An ordinary person you know well always outperforms an admirable person you know only from a distance.
Model answer(216 words)
The person I want to talk about is my aunt Vera, who is my mother's older sister and who, slightly unusually, taught me more about work than either of my parents did.
I've known her all my life, obviously, but we became close when I was about fifteen and started spending summers at her flat because it was near my school. She ran a small bakery at the time — six tables, nothing grand — and I helped out at weekends, mostly washing up and eventually serving.
What she did that mattered was refuse to let me be careless. If I stacked the chairs badly she would make me redo it, not angrily, just as a matter of fact. She had a phrase she used constantly, which translates roughly as "do it properly or don't start", and I heard it several hundred times that summer.
The influence has turned out to be quite deep. I'm not especially talented at most things I do, but I finish them, and I finish them to a standard I'm willing to put my name on — and that came from her rather than from school. I still catch myself redoing small tasks that nobody would have noticed, and I know exactly whose voice is in my head when I do.
Why this answer scores well
All four bullets are covered and the fourth gets the most time, which is correct — "explain how" is where the examiner hears extended, connected speech.
The answer's strength is that the influence is shown rather than asserted. "She taught me to work hard" is a claim; "I still catch myself redoing small tasks that nobody would have noticed, and I know exactly whose voice is in my head" is evidence. Concrete beats admirable, every time.
Note the choice of person: an aunt with a small bakery, not a famous figure. Candidates reach for Einstein or a national hero and then cannot produce two minutes of detail. The number of tables in the bakery is doing more work than any adjective would.
Fluency and Coherence: natural spoken markers — "obviously", "at the time", "What she did that mattered was", "quite deep". These organise the answer the way real speech does.
Lexical Resource: unshowy and precise: "nothing grand", "as a matter of fact", "to a standard I'm willing to put my name on". No word here is difficult; the phrasing is what scores.
Grammatical Range: a non-defining relative clause in the opening sentence, past habitual ("she would make me redo it"), present perfect ("has turned out to be"), and a reported phrase handled naturally.
Grammar used here
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