Speaking Part 2: Cue Card (Long Turn): Question 2

Worked solution

Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 response

Fluency & Coherence

The talk is organised around the three descriptive bullets in a clear, logical order (location and frequency, then typical activity, then reason for enjoyment) and each paragraph opens with a signal of that shift (“Whenever I go…”, “The reason I enjoy visiting so much is…”), so the structure is easy to follow despite sounding completely unscripted, with natural self-correction (“probably once every couple of weeks if I’m honest”) rather than memorised chunks.

Lexical Resource

Precise, topic-appropriate vocabulary is used throughout (“tucked down a side street”, “crammed floor to ceiling”, “a little pocket of calm”) and collocations are handled naturally (“stumbled across it”, “catches my eye”) rather than through simple, repeated adjectives, which gives the description real texture without sounding like a list of memorised phrases.

Grammatical Range & Accuracy

A wide range of structures is controlled accurately: present simple for habitual action (“I just wander between the shelves”), past simple for the origin story (“I first stumbled across it”), and a present perfect for ongoing relevance (“I’ve been going back ever since”), plus an accurately formed non-defining relative clause (“Ruth, an elderly woman named Ruth, always has some recommendation”), all combined with zero tense or agreement errors.

Common pitfalls specific to this task

See commonMistakes above: the most common band-6 error on this card is spending too long on physical description of the place and reaching the final “explain why” bullet only in the last few seconds, so the reasoning that actually distinguishes a higher band ends up rushed or missing entirely.