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    Speaking Part 2Reported 23 July 2026

    Describe a wild animal you want to learn more about

    The cue card

    Describe a wild animal you want to learn more about.

    How to answer it

    The card asks what you want to learn, not what you know, so build it around a question you actually have — how they navigate, why they migrate, how they survive a winter. That framing rescues you from needing facts you do not have and sounds far more natural than a recited encyclopaedia entry.

    What moves the band

    • Nature lexis: they're native to, endangered, in the wild, habitat loss, they hunt in packs.
    • The zoo questions want both sides: conservation and education against confinement.

    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 wild animal I would like to learn more about is the elephant, which is one of the largest animals on our planet.

    Elephants live in Africa and in Asia, mostly in forests and grasslands. They are very big and heavy, they have a long trunk which they use to drink water and to pick up food, and they have big ears which help them to stay cool in hot weather. They eat plants, grass and fruit, and they can eat for many hours every day.

    Elephants are also very intelligent animals. They live in family groups led by an old female, they have a very good memory, and scientists say that they can feel emotions and that they are sad when a member of their group dies.

    Unfortunately elephants are in danger because of hunters who kill them for their tusks, and because people are destroying their natural habitat.

    I would like to learn more about elephants because they are beautiful and interesting animals.

    Why it scores what it scores: Well organised, with solid vocabulary and no grammatical trouble. But the card asks what the candidate wants to LEARN, and this answers what they already know — four paragraphs of facts and then one sentence saying elephants are interesting. The plan's advice is to build the answer around a question you actually have, and there is no question anywhere in this answer.

    Band 8

    What an 8 sounds like

    I'd choose the Arctic tern, and specifically I want to know one thing about it, which is how it finds its way.

    It's an unremarkable-looking seabird, and every year it flies from roughly the Arctic to roughly the Antarctic and back — something like seventy thousand kilometres. A bird that weighs about a hundred grams. It sees more daylight in a year than any other living thing.

    What I can't get past is the navigation. I know roughly what the explanations are — magnetic fields, the position of the sun, possibly stars — but that's the level of an encyclopedia entry, and what I want to understand is how it was ever established. How do you test whether a bird is reading a magnetic field? You can't ask it. So the question I'd really like answered is as much about the experiments as the bird.

    And the thing I'd most like to know is whether a first-year tern, flying that route for the first time with no adult guiding it, is following something it learned or something it was born already knowing. That distinction feels enormous to me and I've never found an answer I could actually follow.

    Why it scores what it scores: The candidate takes the card's actual instruction seriously and organises the whole answer around one open question, which is what the plan recommends and almost nobody does. Admitting the limits of their own knowledge is what allows the language to become genuinely speculative — you can't ask it, something it was born already knowing — rather than descriptive. Two minutes, one idea, no list of facts.

    Phrases worth stealing

    • “specifically I want to know one thing about it, which is how it finds its way”
    • “It sees more daylight in a year than any other living thing”
    • “that's the level of an encyclopedia entry”
    • “How do you test whether a bird is reading a magnetic field? You can't ask it.”
    • “something it learned or something it was born already knowing”

    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 should animals be protected?
    • Should children visit zoos?
    • What role do zoos play?

    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.