Part 1 — Introduction and interview (4–5 minutes)
Answer each question aloud in 2–4 natural sentences. Press 🔊 to hear the examiner ask it. Don't script — react.
Part 2 — Individual long turn (3–4 minutes)
You have one minute to prepare (make notes!) and should then speak for one to two minutes. Use the timers — the discipline is the practice.
Describe an important change you made in your life.
You should say:
- what the change was and when you made it
- what made you decide to change
- how difficult the change was to make
- what your life was like before the change
and explain how this change has affected your life, and whether you think it will be permanent.
You will have one minute to prepare and should speak for one to two minutes.
Part 3 — Two-way discussion (4–5 minutes)
These get harder as they go. Build answers with: Answer → Explain → Example → Alternative view → Evaluation. Open the follow-ups only after you've answered — that's what the examiner asks when an answer is thin.
Examiner follow-ups
- Is it a failure of willpower or something else?
- Does knowing why we fail actually help?
Examiner follow-ups
- Why would surroundings matter more than intentions?
- Can you change while everything around you stays the same?
Examiner follow-ups
- What separates the resolutions that survive?
- Is there a better moment than January to change something?
Examiner follow-ups
- What might create that appearance?
- Was staying the same a choice for earlier generations, or a constraint?
Examiner follow-ups
- What does one person's change demand from everyone else?
- Is that resistance ever justified?
Examiner follow-ups
- Who is usually not consulted?
- Could that be done more fairly?
Examiner follow-ups
- Can you give an example of what gets lost?
- Is preserving the old ever just nostalgia?
Examiner follow-ups
- Whose job is it to look after them?
- Is being left behind about money, or something more?
Examiner follow-ups
- Who tends to write the story of whether a change was good?
- Does compensating the losers actually settle the debt?
Examiner follow-ups
- What, if anything, stays fixed through all our changes?
- Would you want to be the same person at seventy that you are now?
What a Band 8–9 performance should demonstrate
Judge your recording against the four official criteria. An accent is not required — clarity is.
Fluency & Coherence
- Carries the Part 2 arc — life before, the trigger, the struggle, life after — as one continuous story, resisting the urge to list 'reasons for my change' like an essay plan.
- Marks time and effort naturally: "for the first few weeks", "there was a stretch where I nearly gave up", "it only really settled after…" — the difficulty bullet needs duration, and duration needs these markers.
- Moves between the personal and the civic in Part 3 — from my habits to whole neighbourhoods — without the gears grinding audibly.
- Handles the abstract final questions by thinking aloud with structure: "There are two things being asked there — let me take the identity part first" is Band 9 behaviour, not evasion.
- Rarely leaves an answer at one sentence; the examiner's follow-up prompts should mostly go unused.
Lexical Resource
- Change vocabulary with genuine range: turning point, wake-up call, backslide, stick with it, cold turkey, incremental, out of my comfort zone, second nature.
- Neighbourhood and city lexis used precisely: gentrification, rent hike, local institution, footfall, community fabric, priced out — deployed where they belong, not sprinkled for effect.
- Distinguishes shades the topic turns on: change vs improvement vs disruption; resident vs local vs newcomer.
- Habit language beyond 'good and bad habits': trigger, cue, autopilot, fall back into, out of habit, force of habit.
- One earned idiom ("I was running on autopilot until the day I wasn't") rather than a parade of memorised proverbs about change being the only constant.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
- Used to / would for the 'before' picture: "I used to say yes to everything; I'd end every week exhausted and vaguely resentful."
- Present perfect carrying the 'since' story: "I've kept it up for two years now", "the area has lost three of its oldest shops."
- Concessive structures for the winners-and-losers questions: "However necessary the renovation was, the people who made the street worth renovating could no longer afford it."
- Hypotheticals across time: "If I'd waited for motivation, I'd still be waiting" — mixed conditionals are exactly what this cue card invites.
- Nominalisation used in moderation for Part 3 register: "the disappearance of small shops", "resistance to change" — without stacking three abstract nouns per sentence.
Pronunciation
- Contrastive stress carries the before/after spine of Part 2: "I DIDN'T change because I wanted to — I changed because I HAD to."
- The many comparatives in this test — faster, fairer, harder, better off — keep their final consonants; 'harder' and 'harder to' don't blur into mush.
- Pace drops naturally for weight at the reflective moments ("and that... is the part nobody warns you about") — a controlled pause reads as emphasis, not hesitation.
- Lists of neighbourhood details use varied intonation; three flat items in a row sound like inventory, not description.
- Multi-syllable topic words — gentrification, deliberately, permanent, identity, philosophical — stressed correctly or traded for plainer words without fuss.
How to develop a Band 9 answer for this test
- Opening / context — state the change plainly in the first sentence: quitting a job, moving cities, giving up sugar, starting to run at 5 a.m. Name it and date it; don't build suspense.
- Life before — paint the 'before' honestly and briefly: what a typical week looked like and what was quietly wrong with it. This is the fourth bullet, and it's the measuring stick for everything after.
- The trigger — the specific moment or realisation that tipped you: a health scare, a throwaway comment, an evening that crystallised things. One concrete scene beats three abstract reasons.
- The struggle — how hard it actually was: the false starts, the week you backslid, what nearly pulled you back. Difficulty is a listed bullet; a change that sounds effortless sounds invented.
- The effect — how life is different now, shown through specifics: what a week looks like today, what you notice, what people close to you say. Show the after the way you showed the before.
- Concluding sentence — answer the permanence question directly: will it last, and what's your evidence — then stop. A one-line honest doubt ("ask me again in five years") can land better than false certainty.
“Some say the easiest way to change yourself is to change your surroundings — new city, new room, new people. Do you buy that?”
- Answer: take a clear position — e.g. largely yes; surroundings beat willpower more often than we like to admit.
- Explain: give the mechanism — habits are answers to cues, and your environment is the cue machine; move the cues and the old behaviour has nothing to grip, while staying put means fighting the same triggers daily with limited willpower.
- Example: one concrete illustration — people who quit smoking often manage it when they change jobs or cities, because the corner shop, the smoking spot and the smoking friends all vanish at once; the same person, back in the old setting for a week, often relapses.
- Alternative view: concede genuinely — surroundings can't do everything; people carry their patterns with them, and someone who moves to escape themselves usually arrives to find themselves waiting. Internal change without any external change does happen — it's just rarer and slower.
- Evaluate: land the judgement — so the practical wisdom is to spend your effort where the leverage is: redesign the environment first, and save willpower for the parts no move can fix.
Common mistakes for this specific test
The card says a change you made. Describing how your family moved cities when you were nine, or how the pandemic changed everything, hands the agency to someone else — and the bullets about deciding and difficulty become unanswerable.
The fourth bullet — what life was like before — is the baseline that makes 'important' credible. Candidates who start at the decision leave the examiner with an after and no before, which flattens the whole story.
Difficulty is explicitly on the card. A transformation narrated without a single setback ('I decided to wake at five, and from then on I did') sounds either untrue or unimportant. The backslide is where the marks are.
This topic pulls candidates into Instagram English: 'I stepped out of my comfort zone and never looked back, because growth mindset.' Examiners hear it daily. Plain, specific honesty outscores borrowed inspiration every time.
"Has the area changed?" answered with "Yes, many new buildings." wastes a gift of a question. Name one thing that arrived, one that vanished, and how you feel about the trade — that's a full answer.
Saying 'gentrification' three times is not an answer. The question asks who decides what a neighbourhood becomes — landlords, councils, developers, longtime residents — so name the players and take a view on the imbalance.
"We should help poor people adapt" is a sentiment, not an analysis. Say who concretely gets left behind — older residents, small traders, people whose rent doubles — and what 'keeping up' would actually require of them.
"I changed my diet, so people can change" is Part 2 thinking. Part 3 asks about people in general, neighbourhoods, generations. Generalise — 'most people who try', 'in fast-growing cities' — and let your own case be one piece of evidence.
The identity question at the end is deliberately abstract, and some candidates wave it away with 'that's too deep for me'. You don't need philosophy — pick a side (change threatens us / change makes us) and reason from one honest example.
In a test built around one word, variation is Lexical Resource on a plate: shift, transition, turn things around, overhaul, reinvent, let go of, take up. Candidates who ride 'change' through every sentence leave those marks on the table.