Question Type 1: Basic Description Questions

Irrelevant content

Although we have said that content is irrelevant to your score - you cannot produce two-minute content that is not related to the topic.

A fairly common problem in Part Two is that candidates talk about a topic different to the one on their card. Example:

Describe a sport that you like playing or watching.

Sometimes a candidate will say:

I don’t like sport so I will describe my favorite hobby which is playing computer games.

Clearly this is off-topic and Part Two speeches which are off-topic are marked down –basically you lose marks.

If you are given the topic “sports”, the examiner is expecting to hear language (especially vocabulary) related to that topic. If you avoid the topic, you will not produce language related to your topic and your score will be seriously affected.

Later in this section we will look at how to select your content in Part Two.

Part Two Topics

One of the challenging aspects of Part Two is the huge number of potential topics. Naturally with such a wide range of topics every candidate has certain topic areas that he or she is comfortable with and others that they find more difficult.

In the strategy section of this chapter hopefully this problem will be addressed, but first it is probably a good idea to look at the Part Two topics.

One important aspect to recognize is that many of the Part One topics are recycled as Part Two topics.

Examples: