Cue card
Describe a piece of technology you find useful in everyday life.
You should say:
- what it is
- how often you use it
- what you use it for
and explain why you find it so useful.
Task
A Part 2 cue card. You get one minute to prepare and should speak for one to two minutes. Cover all four bullet points, but spend the most time on the final "explain why" — that is where the examiner hears extended, connected speech.
Model answer(226 words)
I'd like to talk about my noise-cancelling headphones, which sound like a fairly ordinary thing to choose but have genuinely changed how I work.
They're a fairly basic over-ear pair I bought second-hand about two years ago, so nothing expensive or particularly fancy. I use them almost every single day — probably four or five hours on a typical weekday, and even longer if I'm revising for something.
Mostly I use them for studying. I live on a busy road with a bus stop right outside, and I share a flat, so there's constant background noise. I also use them for calls with my cousin who lives abroad, and for listening to podcasts while I'm cooking, which is how I've picked up quite a lot of vocabulary.
The reason I find them so useful is that they don't just block sound — they change what I'm capable of doing at home. Before I had them, I used to walk twenty minutes to a library whenever I needed to concentrate, which meant I simply didn't bother on days when I was tired. Now I can create that same quiet in about three seconds without leaving my desk.
So although it's a small object, it's probably the single purchase that's had the biggest effect on my day-to-day life, mainly because it removed an obstacle I'd stopped even noticing.
Why this answer scores well
Fluency and Coherence: all four bullets are covered in order, and the answer runs long enough without stalling. Natural discourse markers ("Mostly", "The reason I find them so useful is", "So although") organise the speech the way a real speaker does, rather than sounding memorised.
Lexical Resource: the answer is specific — "noise-cancelling", "over-ear", "second-hand", "revising", "background noise". Specificity is what lifts a Part 2 answer; "a very good technology that helps me a lot" would score far lower while saying the same thing.
Grammatical Range: mixes past habit ("I used to walk twenty minutes"), present perfect ("I've picked up quite a lot of vocabulary"), a non-defining relative clause ("which sound like a fairly ordinary thing"), and a past perfect at the end ("an obstacle I'd stopped even noticing").
Pronunciation aside, what earns the band here is the final paragraph: it answers "why" with a consequence rather than a description. Saying the headphones removed the need to walk to a library is concrete evidence; saying they are "very helpful" is not.
A common mistake to avoid: choosing an impressive object you cannot discuss for two minutes. An ordinary object you know well always scores better.
Grammar used here
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