Question Type 1: Basic Description Questions

Part One Topic Part Two Topic

Restaurants A restaurant

Reading A book

Public transport Form of public transport

TV TV programme

The sea A river, take, sea

Seasons A season

Clothes An item of clothing

Photography A photograph

Hobbies A hobby

Sports A sport

Animals An animal

Buildings A building

This list could go on, but the main thing to realize is that most of the topic areas for Part Two are very similar to Part One. This is to your advantage because it means you can use Part One language in your Part Two.

There is no danger of repetition here because if you are given a certain topic in Part One you will NOT get the same topic in Part Two. So if the examiner asks you about "animals" in Part One, you will not get the Part Two topic "Describe an animal..."

Instead of making a huge list of Part Two topics it is easier to put all of the topics into groups or categories.

The most obvious categories are as follows:

• 
  Experiences / Past events
  
• 
  Objects / Material possessions
  
• 
  People
  
• 
  Places
  
• 
  Media related
  
• 
  Others (anything that doesn‘t fit into the 5 categories above.)
  

One of the advantages of grouping topics together is that when you look at the relationships between some of the topics you will see that it is in fact possible to use the same content for more than one topic card.

In this way you don't need to prepare a separate response for every topic card, you can reuse the same language for many different topics.

The individual topic cards are given later in this section.

There are a number of different ways to deal with Part Two and some are more effective than others.

From our earlier observations we can conclude that the best strategy is one which focuses directly on the features detailed in the marking system and produces as many of these features as possible in the 2-minute time Game.

One important area that is often neglected is the one minute preparation time. In my experience many candidates actually cause problems for themselves in the one-minute preparation time.

Activity

Look at the following topic card and make notes for one minute.

Describe an interesting building in your city.

You should say:

What the building looks like

What it is used for

Why it is interesting

How often you visit this building.

Most people write notes in the following way:

• 
  a Chinese building / old
  
• 
  its very old
  
• 
  a library / books
  
• 
  once a month
  

What often happens is that most people write "answers" to the guidelines and prompts and usually those "answers" are in very simple language.

When Part Two begins people are focused on their notes - their notes contain basic answers to the prompts so the focus of their Part Two is basic answers in response to the prompts. Obviously, this is not an effective strategy.

At this early stage one effective strategy is to ignore the prompts altogether and use a simple Three-step Preparation Method.