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    Speaking Part 2Reported 6 August 2026

    Describe something in your home that was broken and then repaired

    The cue card

    Describe something in your home that was broken and later repaired.

    • You should say: what it was
    • You should say: how it broke
    • You should say: how it was repaired
    • You should say: and explain how you felt about it

    How to answer it

    A narrative card with a structure built in — before, the breakage, the fix — so use it. The breakage is your chance at a story (who dropped it, what the noise was); the repair is your chance at precise vocabulary. Decide in the prep minute whether you fixed it, a professional fixed it, or it was never quite right again; the last option is the most interesting and still answers the card in full.

    What moves the band

    • Repair lexis lifts this card fast: it stopped working altogether, a loose connection, replace the part, patched it up, good as new, on its last legs.
    • The Part 3 turn is about throwaway culture. Have one line ready on why repairing is often dearer than replacing.

    Two answers, two bands

    Both answers below respond to this exact question. Read them in order: the difference between them is what a band is actually made of. They are written by us for this page — they are not candidate transcripts.

    Band 6.5

    What a 6.5 sounds like

    I would like to describe our washing machine, which broke down last year and was repaired by a technician.

    It is a big white washing machine in our kitchen and we have had it for about eight years. One day my mother put the clothes inside and started it as usual, but after a few minutes it stopped and there was water on the floor.

    My father called a repair man, who came the next day. He looked at the machine for about an hour and said that a pipe inside was damaged and also a filter was blocked. He changed the pipe and cleaned the filter, and he told us that we should clean the filter every few months. After that the machine worked normally again.

    I felt happy that it was repaired, because a new washing machine is very expensive and my parents did not have to buy one.

    So this is the story of something in my home that was broken and later repaired.

    Why it scores what it scores: Clean sequencing and all four bullets appear, so the structure is sound. The gap is that the fourth bullet — how you felt — gets one sentence about money and nothing else, while the first three are given generous detail. That imbalance is common and costly: the feeling bullet is the only one asking for something other than facts, and answering it in six words wastes the part of the card that was easiest to develop.

    Band 8

    What an 8 sounds like

    The thing I want to talk about is a wall clock, which I'd have said was worthless right up until the moment it stopped.

    It's my parents' — wooden, ugly, been in the hallway my entire life. It broke in the least dramatic way possible: nobody dropped it, nobody knocked it. It simply stopped one Tuesday and none of us noticed for two days, which tells you how much attention we'd been paying it.

    The repair is the interesting part. My mother refused to throw it out and refused to let anyone buy a new one, and eventually found a man about an hour away who still does clocks. He kept it for three weeks. When we collected it he spent ten minutes explaining what he'd replaced, most of which I didn't follow, and then said something like "whoever looked after this before me knew what they were doing" — which turned out to be my grandfather.

    How I felt is more complicated than pleased. Slightly ashamed, mostly. I'd been ready to bin an object my grandfather had maintained for thirty years, purely because I'd stopped seeing it. It ticks slightly louder now and I've become weirdly fond of the sound.

    Why it scores what it scores: The card's built-in structure — before, breakage, repair — is followed exactly, but the candidate inverts the usual weighting and gives the feeling bullet the longest paragraph, which is where the range lives. Reported speech arrives naturally through the repairer's remark, and the answer resolves on a specific, slightly uncomfortable emotion rather than pleased. The undramatic breakage is a deliberate choice that pays off.

    Phrases worth stealing

    • “which I'd have said was worthless right up until the moment it stopped”
    • “It simply stopped one Tuesday and none of us noticed for two days”
    • “found a man about an hour away who still does clocks”
    • “I'd been ready to bin an object my grandfather had maintained for thirty years”
    • “It ticks slightly louder now and I've become weirdly fond of the sound”

    Part 3 questions reported with it

    Part 3 follows the topic of the cue card, so these are the discussion questions the same candidates were asked next.

    • Are IT and repair jobs valued highly by society?
    • Is the quality of products worse than it used to be?
    • What things do people repair themselves?
    • Why do people take phones to specialist repair shops?

    These are candidate recalls. These are questions reported by test-takers after their exams, not official or leaked IELTS material. Wording varies by test version, location and memory. Use them for timed practice — never as a prediction of what you will be asked.

    Practise these next

    Know the number. Now move it.

    A conversion table tells you where you stand today. Langujet's AI marks your writing and speaking against the real rubric and tells you exactly which criterion is holding your score down.