Describe a person who has inspired you. You should say: - who this person is - how you got to know them - what kind of person they are and explain why this person has inspired you. You will have to talk about the topic for one to two minutes.

Answer: Okay, so the person I'd like to talk about is a man called Mr Kowalski, who used to live next door to my family when I was growing up. He was a retired merchant sailor in his seventies, and he'd spend most afternoons pottering about his garden or fixing up an old wooden dinghy p…. Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 response Fluency & Coherence The candidate moves through all three descriptive bullet points inside a single connected story rather than answering them as separate mini-questions, using natural spoken s…

IELTS Speaking Part 2 Cue Card: Describe a Person Who Has Inspired You

Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 response

Fluency & Coherence

The candidate moves through all three descriptive bullet points inside a single connected story rather than answering them as separate mini-questions, using natural spoken sequencing (“I got to know him almost by accident, actually…”, “So for the next two summers…”) to keep the narrative moving without hesitation. The final paragraph pivots cleanly onto the explain bullet with a clear discourse marker (“I think the reason he’s inspired me so much is…”) so the examiner never has to guess which part of the prompt is being answered.

Lexical Resource

Vocabulary is precise and idiomatic without sounding rehearsed: “pottering about”, “unflappable”, “capsized”, and “catch myself thinking back to him” all sound like genuine spontaneous speech rather than memorised phrases. Paraphrase is used naturally. “inspired” is never simply repeated but is unpacked through the concrete idea of “a different way of dealing with setbacks.”

Grammatical Range & Accuracy

The response mixes past simple narrative (“he taught me”, “I capsized his boat”) with present-tense reflection (“I still catch myself thinking back”) to move fluidly between the story and its present-day relevance, and includes accurate reported speech (“he just said, ‘well, if you’re that curious…’”) and a subordinate clause structure (“even when I capsized his little boat twice in one week”) with no errors of tense or agreement.

Common pitfalls specific to this task

See commonMistakes above: the most damaging is describing an inspiring person in only vague, generic adjectives without ever landing on the specific “explain why” bullet, which examiners weight heavily because it is the part of the card testing genuine extended reasoning rather than simple description.