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 a piece of advice you received that turned out to be useful.
You should say:
- who gave you this advice
- what the situation was at the time
- what exactly they told you
- whether you followed it straight away or hesitated
and explain how the advice turned out to be useful, and why you think it worked.
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
- Does that differ between generations?
- Why those people rather than professionals?
Examiner follow-ups
- Can you think of a situation where the two would point in different directions?
- Does the type of problem change your answer?
Examiner follow-ups
- What do influencers offer that traditional experts don't?
- Is that trust deserved, in your view?
Examiner follow-ups
- What might get in the way?
- Can well-meant advice still cause harm?
Examiner follow-ups
- How would that even be enforced online?
- Where would you draw the line?
Examiner follow-ups
- What are they really looking for, then?
- Is ignoring advice always a mistake?
Examiner follow-ups
- What might have caused that shift?
- Is it a healthy development or a worrying one?
Examiner follow-ups
- How can you tell which one you're receiving?
- Does the relationship between the two people matter?
Examiner follow-ups
- What can a human adviser offer that a system cannot?
- Would you personally trust a machine's advice on a major life decision?
Examiner follow-ups
- Can you have too much scepticism?
- Does your answer change in an emergency?
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
- Tells the Part 2 advice story in sequence — situation, the advice itself, the hesitation, the outcome — without circling back to fill gaps.
- Buys thinking time in natural English ("that's a good question — the person who comes to mind is…") rather than with silence or fillers.
- In Part 3, moves smoothly from concrete cases (a doctor, an influencer) to general claims about trust without the answer losing shape.
- Handles the two-sided questions — qualifications versus experience, question or follow — by weighing both and still landing on a position.
- Answers the follow-up actually asked; a Band 7.5+ candidate adjusts mid-answer instead of finishing a prepared thought.
Lexical Resource
- Topic vocabulary used precisely: take something on board, second opinion, word of mouth, credentials, a grain of salt, vested interest.
- Distinguishes near-synonyms the topic invites — advice, guidance, recommendation, warning, instruction — instead of using 'advice' for all five.
- Natural collocations: "follow someone's advice", "seek professional help", "trust someone's judgement" — not "obey an advice", which also flags the countability error.
- Reading vocabulary in Part 1 sounds lived-in: "I lost the habit at university", "I'm halfway through it", "a book I couldn't put down".
- Can paraphrase 'influencer culture' ideas — parasocial trust, someone who feels like a friend — without needing jargon to do it.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
- Reported speech under control in Part 2: "she told me not to reply that night", "he warned me that I'd regret it" — the natural grammar of retelling advice.
- Third conditionals for the outcome: "If I hadn't listened to her, I would probably have taken the first offer."
- Uncountable 'advice' handled correctly throughout — "a piece of advice", "some advice", never "an advice" or "advices".
- Modality graded accurately in Part 3: "advice can mislead", "professionals may be losing ground", "that should probably be regulated".
- Comparative structures for the trust questions: "far more likely to", "nowhere near as influential as", "the more personal it feels, the more we trust it".
Pronunciation
- The noun advice and the verb advise are distinguished — final /s/ versus /z/ — since both will almost certainly come up.
- Contrastive stress carries the argument: "I'd trust her experience, not her certificates."
- Reported speech is delivered with a slight shift in tone, so the listener hears where the quoted advice begins and ends.
- Rhythm stays even in the abstract questions — nerves tend to flatten intonation exactly when the ideas get harder.
- Weak forms are natural in high-frequency chunks: "I should've listened", "she was right", "a piece of advice".
How to develop a Band 9 answer for this test
- Set the scene — one or two sentences on the situation you were in and why you needed guidance at all, so the advice has stakes.
- Introduce the adviser — who they were and, briefly, why their opinion carried weight with you (or why it surprisingly didn't at first).
- Quote the advice — give the actual words as close as you can remember: "she said, 'don't decide anything while you're angry'". A quoted line anchors the whole story.
- Cover the hesitation bullet honestly — whether you acted on it immediately or resisted, and what made you resist; the reluctance is often the most interesting part.
- Show the advice working — a specific moment where following it changed the outcome, not just "it was very useful".
- Close with why it worked — one reflective line answering the cue card's final question: what the adviser understood that you didn't at the time.
“Why do you think so many people now take advice from online influencers they've never met?”
- Answer: commit to a mechanism — influencers feel like friends, and we've always taken advice from friends more readily than from institutions.
- Explain: unpack it — watching someone daily for years creates one-sided intimacy; their advice arrives wrapped in a relationship, while an expert's arrives wrapped in a lecture.
- Example: make it concrete — millions follow fitness or money advice from creators with no credentials, because the creator shows their own results on camera, which reads as proof.
- Alternative view: concede fairly — some influencers are genuinely knowledgeable, and traditional experts partly created this vacuum by being inaccessible and speaking in jargon.
- Evaluate: land the judgement — the trust itself is understandable, but it transfers badly; liking someone is evidence they're likeable, not that they're right, and confusing the two is where the harm starts.
Common mistakes for this specific test
Advice is uncountable, and this cue card guarantees you'll need the word repeatedly. It's "a piece of advice", "some advice", "her advice". One slip is forgivable; making it your signature phrase for two minutes is a visible grammar ceiling.
The card asks about a piece of advice. Candidates spend ninety seconds on how wonderful their grandmother is and ten seconds on what she actually said — leaving the 'how it proved useful' part, which carries the story, with no time at all.
"My father told me to work hard" gives you nothing to develop — no situation, no hesitation, no visible outcome. Pick advice tied to one real decision: a job you nearly took, a message you nearly sent, money you nearly spent.
"Whether you followed it straight away or hesitated" is where the human interest lives. Candidates who claim they followed the advice instantly and it worked perfectly tell a flat story — and flat stories run out before two minutes.
The influencer and expertise questions sit near media-literacy territory, and rehearsed speeches about misinformation surface fast. The questions here are about trust and advice specifically — answer those, not the essay you memorised.
"Both are important" is where the answer starts, not where it ends. Say which one wins in which situations — surgery versus starting a business — and you've shown the flexibility the question was fishing for.
"I personally never trust influencers" answers a question nobody asked. Part 3 wants patterns — why people in general trust them — with your own habits used, at most, as one small illustration.
The verb ends in a /z/ sound, the noun in /s/. Mixing them is a small error, but this topic makes you say both dozens of times, so it becomes impossible for the examiner not to notice.
Recommendation systems already steer what people buy, watch and study — the question is about the present tense, not robots. Grounding your answer in what already happens keeps it credible and gives you easy examples.