Short answer: In Part 2 you get a cue card, one minute to prepare with pen and paper, and then you talk for one to two minutes until the examiner stops you. To fill the two minutes, use the minute to write four keywords, one per point on the card plus one for the closing "and explain" line, then give each point twenty to thirty seconds: a sentence of context, a detail, a feeling. The talks that stop at fifty seconds are the ones that answered each point in one sentence; the talks that reach two minutes are the ones that widened each point in time, compared it with something, added a small anecdote and said how the speaker felt. Below: the format, the method of the minute, a timed structure, two transcribed answers on a cue card from this month's list (one that stops early, one that runs the full two minutes), the techniques for keeping going, what to do if you have never lived the situation, and the five mistakes.
Part 2 is the only part of the Speaking test where you speak alone, and it is the part candidates fear most for a reason that has nothing to do with English: two minutes of unbroken talk is longer than it sounds, and nobody does it in daily life. The examiner does not ask questions, does not nod you along and does not fill the silence. Candidates who are fluent in Part 1 run dry after fifty seconds in Part 2, say "that's all", and lose the chance to show the extended speech that Fluency and Coherence at band 7 asks for. The fix is not more vocabulary; it is a method for the preparation minute and a structure for the two minutes that follow.
The format
The examiner hands you a card with a topic ("Describe a ..."), three or four points ("You should say: ...") and a final line that begins "and explain". You get a pencil and paper and one minute to prepare. Then you talk for one to two minutes; the examiner may ask one short question at the end, then moves to Part 3. Two things about the timing matter. The examiner stops you at two minutes, so you cannot go on too long and there is no penalty for being interrupted: being stopped mid-sentence means you filled the time. And under one minute is short: the descriptors reward speaking at length, and a talk that ends early leaves the examiner without enough speech to assess.
The card is not a list of questions to answer one by one in a sentence each; it is a plan for a short story, and the points are the paragraphs. The general shape of the three parts is in IELTS Speaking Part 1, 2, 3: Cue Cards and Band 7 Answers, with the current list of cue card topics. This page is only about the two minutes.
The method of the minute: four keywords
One minute is not enough to write sentences, and sentences are the wrong thing to write, because you will read them. Write one keyword, or at most two, for each point on the card, in the order of the card, top to bottom. Three points and an "and explain" line make four keywords. Each keyword is a hook: something concrete you can say three or four sentences about. A name, a place, an object, a moment.
For "Describe a journey that did not go as planned", the four keywords might be: "cousin, coast", "signal failure", "taxi, two students", "leave a gap". Look at them for the last ten seconds of the minute and decide two more things: the tense you will start in (past, for a journey) and your first sentence, so that you begin without a silence. Then put the pencil down.
While you speak, the card and your notes stay in front of you. Glance down when you finish a point, find the next keyword, look up, continue. The notes are there to stop you forgetting a point, not to be read: the examiner is listening for speech, and a read sentence sounds read.
A structure for the two minutes
The two minutes divide naturally by the points on the card. The table gives one way to allocate them; the seconds are a guide to the shape, not a rule to watch on a clock. What matters is that no point gets one sentence and the "and explain" line gets its time.
| Time | What you say | How | On the journey card |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 to 20 seconds | The context: what you are going to describe, when it was, who was involved | Two or three sentences that set the scene. Start with the topic sentence you decided during the minute. | "The journey I would like to describe is a train trip I took last spring to visit my cousin ..." |
| 20 to 80 seconds | The points on the card, in order, twenty to thirty seconds each | For each point: a sentence that answers it, a sentence of detail, a sentence of what you felt or thought. Glance at the next keyword between points. | Where you were going (the coast, the plan), what went wrong (the train stopped, the connection), what you did (the taxi, the slow train) |
| 80 to 110 seconds | The "and explain" line, which is the point with the most room for opinion | Give the reason, then a second reason or a consequence. Use "what I learned is", "the reason is", "looking back". | What you learned: a plan is a first version; leave a gap between connections |
| 110 to 120 seconds | The closing line | One sentence that returns to the topic or gives a final feeling, so that the talk ends rather than stops. | "Some of the best conversations I have had were with strangers on a platform." |
If you are stopped before the closing line, nothing is lost. If you reach the closing line at ninety seconds, you have thirty seconds to add: go back to a point and give one more detail, or compare the journey with a normal one. The techniques below are for exactly that moment.
Two answers on the same card
The card is one of the twenty topics dated September 2026 in the Speaking guide: "Describe a journey that did not go as planned. You should say: where you were going, what went wrong, what you did, and explain what you learned from it." Both answers are transcribed as spoken, hesitations included. The first stops at about fifty seconds; the second runs the full two minutes.
OK so, the journey I want to talk about is a trip I took to visit my cousin, er, in another city. I was going by train and, er, the train was late. It was very late, maybe two hours, so I missed my connection. I was very stressed because my cousin was waiting for me. So I called her and I waited for the next train. Er, what I learned is... I learned that I should, er, always check the time and leave early. Yes. That is my journey.
What is missing is not English; the sentences are correct. Each point on the card got one sentence, so the talk ran out with more than a minute left. There is no context (when, which city, why the visit), no detail on what went wrong (why the train was late, what the station was like, what the choice was), nothing on what the speaker did beyond "I waited", and the "explain" point is one line found under pressure. The examiner has fifty seconds of speech to assess Fluency and Coherence, which is not enough for band 7, and the ending ("That is my journey") announces that the speaker has nothing more to say.
The journey I would like to describe is a train trip I took last spring to visit my cousin, who had just moved to a city on the coast, about four hours from where I live. I had planned it carefully, or so I thought: an early train, one change halfway, and I would arrive in time for lunch. What went wrong was the change. My first train left on time, but somewhere in the countryside it simply stopped, and after a long silence the guard announced a signal failure ahead. We sat there for well over an hour, and by the time we crawled into the station my connection had gone. There was no other direct train until the evening. So I had a choice: wait six hours on a platform, or find another way. In the end I shared a taxi to the next big town with two students who were in the same situation, and from there we caught a slow regional train that stopped at every village. I arrived at my cousin's flat after dark, tired and hungry, but oddly cheerful, because the students had turned out to be good company and the taxi driver had told us the whole history of the region. Looking back, what I learned is that a plan is only the first version of a journey. I now always leave a gap between connections, and I have stopped treating a delay as a disaster: some of the best conversations I have had were with strangers on a platform.
- Structure. The four keywords are visible: the context and the destination (the cousin, the coast, the plan), what went wrong (the stop, the signal failure, the missed connection), what the speaker did (the choice, the taxi, the slow train), and the "explain" line with two lessons and a closing sentence. Each point gets several sentences, and the talk ends on a line rather than on "that's all".
- Fluency and Coherence. The links are those of a story, not of an essay: "or so I thought", "what went wrong was", "so I had a choice", "in the end", "looking back". There is no hesitation on language; the pauses a listener would hear fall between ideas.
- Lexical Resource. Ordinary words used precisely: "crawled into the station", "a signal failure", "a slow regional train that stopped at every village", "oddly cheerful", "the first version of a journey". Nothing rare, nothing vague.
- Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Past simple for the events, past perfect where the order matters ("had just moved", "my connection had gone", "had turned out"), present simple and present perfect for the lesson ("I now always leave", "I have stopped"), a relative clause, a colon before an explanation, all error free.
Four techniques for keeping going
When a point runs dry, do not move to the next one at once; extend it with one of these, then move on. Each one adds twenty seconds and, more usefully, adds the kind of detail the examiner rewards.
- Widen in time. Say what happened before and after the moment you are describing. Before: how the plan was made, what you expected. After: what happened the next day, what you told people. The journey above gains its "or so I thought" and its "after dark, tired and hungry" from this.
- Compare. Set the thing against a normal one: this journey against the usual trip, this person against other teachers, this place against the city centre. "Normally the change takes ten minutes; that day ..." gives a sentence and a contrast structure at the same time.
- Add a small anecdote. One concrete moment with a person in it: the guard's announcement, the taxi driver's history lesson, the students. An anecdote is the easiest thing to talk about for thirty seconds, because it has its own order.
- Say what you felt, then and now. "I was furious at the time; now it makes me laugh." Feelings are the natural bridge to the "and explain" line, and the change between then and now gives you a second sentence for free.
If you have never lived the situation
You may draw a card about a celebration you enjoyed when you dislike celebrations, or a journey that went wrong when your journeys have all gone well. Invent. The examiner assesses your English, not your life, and nothing on the card is checked. Take a real place and a real person and change what happened; or take a story you heard from a friend and tell it in the first person. A borrowed story told with detail scores better than a true story told in three sentences. The one rule is to decide during the preparation minute, so that you are not inventing while you speak: keywords for an invented story are written exactly like keywords for a true one.
The same applies to a card you find dull. "Describe a piece of technology you use every day" does not need an interesting device; it needs a device you can talk about for two minutes, which means the one with the most small stories attached, the phone that fell in the sea or the kettle that came from your grandmother.
The five mistakes that cost the most
- Developing only the first point. The most common one. Ninety seconds on who the person is, then "and I admire him because he is kind, so that's all". Give each point its twenty to thirty seconds, and keep the "explain" line for last with time left for it.
- Stopping early and announcing it. "That's all", "I think I finished", "yes" mark the end of a talk that the examiner would have let run. If you feel you are finishing, use a technique from the list above instead of closing.
- Reciting a memorised text. A learned answer on "a person who influenced you" bent onto "an older person you admire" sounds learned: the rhythm is flat, the vocabulary is above the rest of the test, and the points on the card are not addressed. Examiners are trained to hear it and score what they hear.
- Writing sentences in the minute and reading them. The minute produces at most two written sentences, which you then read aloud, then improvise badly around. Four keywords give you two minutes; two sentences give you fifteen seconds.
- Skipping the "and explain" line. It is the last point on the card and the one with the most room for opinion, reasons and a change of tense, all of which the descriptors reward. Candidates who run out of time before it lose the best part of the card. Plan it first, say it last.
The only way to know whether you can fill two minutes is to be timed doing it. Record yourself on a card from the list, with a real minute of preparation and a real two-minute limit, and listen back for the point where you started to repeat. The Speaking test on this site runs the three parts with the timer and returns a transcript with an estimated band on the four criteria, which is a quick way to see how long you actually spoke. The band is an estimate to guide practice, not an official result.
Quick answers
Can I make things up?
Yes. The examiner assesses your English, not the truth of what you say, and nothing on the card is checked. If you have never had a journey that went wrong, borrow one from a friend and tell it in the first person, or take a real trip and change the ending. Decide during the preparation minute, write keywords as you would for a true story, and add the concrete detail that makes it easy to talk about. A story told with detail scores better than a true one told in three sentences.
What if I finish early?
Keep going. If you reach the end of your points with time left, extend the last one with a technique: say what happened before or after, compare it with a normal case, add a small anecdote, or say how you felt then and how you feel now. Do not say "that's all": the examiner will stop you at two minutes, so there is no need to end the talk yourself, and a talk that stops at one minute gives the examiner too little to assess.
Can I take notes?
Yes. The examiner gives you a pencil and paper for the preparation minute, and you keep the card and your notes in front of you while you speak. Write keywords, one per point, not sentences: sentences get read aloud, and a read sentence sounds read. Glance at the next keyword when you finish a point, then look up and continue. The notes are not collected and are not assessed.
Is the AI band official?
No. The band from the Speaking test on this site is an estimate produced by an AI model against the four official criteria, to guide your practice. Only a certified examiner gives an official IELTS band. This site is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to IELTS, the British Council, IDP or Cambridge English.
The short version: four keywords in the minute, one per point plus one for the "and explain" line; twenty to thirty seconds per point, a sentence of context, a detail, a feeling; widen in time, compare, add an anecdote, say what you felt; invent if you have to; never say "that's all". Record one talk against a real timer and listen for where you started to repeat.