Speaking Part 2: Cue Card (Long Turn): Question 4

Worked solution

Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 response

Fluency & Coherence

The story is told with a clear narrative arc (setup, complication, and a reflective conclusion) rather than a flat list of events, and the pivot from “what could have gone badly” to “what actually happened” is signalled explicitly (“What made it memorable, though, wasn’t the delay itself but…”), giving the two-minute turn a shape that keeps the listener oriented throughout without any loss of pace.

Lexical Resource

Vocabulary is vivid and precise for the travel-narrative genre (“ground to a halt”, “closed the line”, “an upturned suitcase”) and the response closes with an idiomatic, reflective turn of phrase (“It’s stuck with me because…”) rather than a flat restatement, showing an ability to move beyond literal description into natural evaluative language.

Grammatical Range & Accuracy

Past narrative tenses are handled with genuine control: past continuous and past perfect are used correctly for background causation (“a snowstorm had closed the line”), past perfect for an earlier state (“an elderly couple who’d lived in the region their whole lives”), and a hypothetical past conditional closes the story accurately (“what should have been a miserable, wasted night had turned into…”), with no slips between these forms.

Common pitfalls specific to this task

See commonMistakes above: the most common band-6 error on a journey-based card is drifting into describing the destination once arrived, rather than the events of the journey itself, which is exactly what this bullet set is asking the candidate to focus on.