The internet sells Part 2 model answers by the thousand — "band 9 sample: describe a person you admire", ready to learn by heart. IDP, one of the IELTS partners, has an official line on that trade:
"Memorised language doesn't give the examiner an accurate measure of your English-language skills. The examiner will be able to tell if you have memorised your answers and this may influence your final band score."
A memorised answer also cannot contain the one thing the marking rewards — fit to your card, told in your words. Below is one full answer to one card, then the part model-answer pages skip: naming the sentences that could never be transplanted to your test.
What Part 2 actually is
Per the official format page:
"The examiner gives you a task card which asks you to talk about a particular topic. You have one minute to prepare your talk, and the examiner will give you a pencil and paper to make notes."
The aim is that you "have time to structure your talk so that you keep talking for 2 minutes". The examiner "will stop you when the time is up" — being stopped is normal — and "may then ask you one or two questions". Part 2 lasts 3–4 minutes including preparation, and its topic feeds straight into Part 3, discussed "in a more general and abstract way".
The failure this page prevents
Arriving with a polished paragraph about "a person you admire" — and getting a card about a repair, a river, or a rule. You either force the script onto the wrong topic, in language visibly not your own, or abandon it and improvise with zero practice at improvising. IDP: "it is never advisable to memorise answers in preparation for your IELTS test" — examiners "are well trained to spot them."
What the examiner is actually scoring
Four criteria, by their official names — Fluency and coherence, Lexical resource, Grammatical range and accuracy, Pronunciation — and per ielts.org, "Each of the criteria carry equal weighting and the overall average gives the IELTS score for Speaking." Not on that list: originality, cleverness, or a "correct" story. The card is a springboard, not a comprehension test.
One real card, one real answer
An original AlmiPrep practice card — written for this page, not an official past paper:
Describe a small repair or fix you did yourself.
You should say:
- what you repaired or fixed
- how you did it
- why you did it yourself
and explain how you felt about it afterwards.
And a full answer, written as speech — contractions, a restart, the lot — not as an essay:
Okay, so the thing I want to describe is the time I fixed a leaking tap — the cold tap in the bathroom of the flat I was renting in Bandung with my cousin Rani, maybe two years ago.
The drip started small, but after a few weeks it was — how do I say it — constant, like a little clock ticking all night, and our water bill went up by about eighty thousand rupiah a month, which for us was real money. The landlord kept promising to send someone, and nobody ever came, so one Saturday I decided to just do it myself.
I watched two videos online, borrowed an adjustable spanner from the man who runs the warung downstairs, and bought a rubber washer for three thousand rupiah — less than a cup of tea. The scary part was shutting off the water, because I couldn't tell — sorry, what I mean is, there were two valves in the corridor and I couldn't tell which one was ours, and I didn't want to cut off the neighbours as well. In the end I guessed right. I unscrewed the head of the tap, swapped the old washer — it was completely flattened and cracked — and put it all back together. Twenty minutes, start to finish.
How did I feel? Honestly, ridiculously proud — far more proud than a twenty-minute job deserved. For a week, every time I washed my hands I felt like an engineer. And Rani finally stopped teasing me about being useless with tools, which was maybe the best part of all.
Reading it against the four criteria
No band for this answer — and be suspicious of any site that assigns one. A band requires a trained examiner in the room hearing the delivery — a transcript cannot even carry Pronunciation. What it can show is what each criterion looks at.
Fluency and coherence. The current official descriptors draw the band 6/7 line here — Band 6: "Coherence may be lost at times as a result of hesitation, repetition and/or self-correction", against Band 7: "Some hesitation, repetition and/or self-correction may occur… However, these will not affect coherence." The restart above — "sorry, what I mean is" — is exactly the self-correction the descriptors expect. The only question is whether the story survives it. Here it does — a template-trained speaker often freezes instead.
Lexical resource. Precise without being showy — spanner, washer, valve, drip, flattened — plus a mid-sentence paraphrase ("how do I say it") when a word doesn't come. Everyday words you actually own beat "plethora" you don't.
Grammatical range and accuracy. Short punches ("In the end I guessed right") mix with longer structures — "The landlord kept promising to send someone, and nobody ever came, so one Saturday I decided to just do it myself" — arising from the story, not inserted to impress.
Pronunciation. Unmarkable on paper — and in the official descriptors, Band 7 Pronunciation is defined only by reference to its neighbours: it "displays all the positive features of band 6, and some, but not all, of the positive features of band 8". On accent, the official wording is narrower than the internet's: Band 8 says "Accent has minimal effect on intelligibility", and IDP says "the IELTS examiner understands a wide range of accents". No official blanket statement that accent doesn't matter exists — accent enters the scale only through intelligibility.
The sentences you cannot steal
This is the case against templates, made concrete. Three sentences from that answer:
- "our water bill went up by about eighty thousand rupiah a month, which for us was real money"
- "borrowed an adjustable spanner from the man who runs the warung downstairs"
- "Rani finally stopped teasing me about being useless with tools"
Each works because it is true of this speaker only — a specific currency and amount, a specific shop and neighbour, a specific cousin with a running joke. In your mouth, on your card, they become recited, not spoken — and a reader who memorises them will do worse on a different card than they would have done improvising honestly, because the preparation minute goes to retrieval instead of to the card in front of them. What transfers is the method: one true story, two or three concrete details with numbers and names, feelings stated plainly at the end.
One more honesty note — no official raw-score-to-band table exists for Speaking (or Writing). Those exist for Listening and Reading only. Any site converting your practice talk to a decimal band is guessing.
What actually costs you
- Reciting — examiners "will be able to tell", and it "may influence your final band score".
- Spending the preparation minute writing full sentences instead of three trigger words per prompt.
- Stopping at forty seconds — Band 6 and 7 Fluency both start from being "able to keep going".
- Treating being stopped by the examiner as failure — stopping you at time is the procedure.
- Performing vocabulary you don't own instead of precise everyday words that fit your story.
Try one
[Try a Speaking task →] — one full task, marked, no card required.