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    Speaking Part 2Reported 13 July 2026

    Describe a famous person you would like to meet

    The cue card

    Describe a famous person you would like to meet.

    How to answer it

    Choose someone whose work you can describe, then make the card about the question you would ask them — that is what turns a biography recital into a two-minute answer with a shape. Say why you want to meet them rather than simply admire them from a distance.

    What moves the band

    • Sustain the conditional: I'd want to ask, I imagine they'd be, I'd probably be too nervous to.
    • The Part 3 questions are about fame as a system; separate being famous from being good at something.

    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

    The famous person I would like to meet is Elon Musk, who is one of the most famous businessmen in the world today.

    He was born in South Africa and later he moved to Canada and then to the United States, where he studied at university. He started several companies, including PayPal, which is an online payment system, and then Tesla, which produces electric cars, and SpaceX, which builds rockets. Now he is one of the richest people in the world and he has millions of followers on social media.

    I would like to meet him because he is a very successful and hard-working person. He works many hours every day and he never gives up, even when his companies have problems. I think he is a good example for young people who want to start their own business.

    If I met him, I would ask him for some advice about how to be successful in business, and I would definitely take a photograph with him.

    That is the famous person I would like to meet.

    Why it scores what it scores: Fluent and organised, and the conditional in the fourth paragraph is handled correctly. What holds it down is that the middle of the answer is a biography the examiner already knows, delivered as a list of companies. The plan warns about exactly this: without a question you genuinely want to ask, the card becomes a recital, and asking for advice about how to be successful is the emptiest version of that question.

    Band 8

    What an 8 sounds like

    I'd like to meet the woman who translated my favourite novel into my language. She isn't famous in the ordinary sense — nobody would recognise her — but within a small world she's very well known, and I've read her work more carefully than I've read most people's faces.

    What she does is take a book written in one language and rebuild it in another so that it still sounds like a person talking. I only understood how hard that is when I read the same novel in English years later and found a joke that simply isn't there in the original. She'd invented it, because the original joke didn't work in our language, and it's better than the one she replaced.

    That's the question I'd want to ask her: how do you decide you're allowed to do that? Where's the line between serving the writer and quietly improving them?

    And honestly I'd want to know whether it bothers her that the person whose sentences I love is her, not him, and that almost nobody who reads that book will ever think about it for a second.

    Why it scores what it scores: Choosing someone the examiner has never heard of is a risk that pays: it removes any possibility of reciting a biography and forces the candidate to explain the work, which is where the language is. The card then hangs on one real question, exactly as the plan advises, and that question is interesting enough to carry the final third of the answer. The structure is invisible because the thinking is doing the organising.

    Phrases worth stealing

    • “I've read her work more carefully than I've read most people's faces”
    • “rebuild it in another so that it still sounds like a person talking”
    • “She'd invented it, because the original joke didn't work in our language”
    • “how do you decide you're allowed to do that?”
    • “the person whose sentences I love is her, not him”

    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.

    • Why do some children become famous?
    • Why do people want to be famous?
    • What should young people do with fame?
    • Is talent necessary for celebrity?

    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.

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