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 public place where you enjoy spending time.
You should say:
- where this place is and what it looks like
- how often you go there and what you do there
- what kinds of people you see there
- how the place makes you feel
and explain why you keep going back to this place rather than somewhere else.
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 mainly about design, or about the people?
- Can a busy place still be relaxing?
Examiner follow-ups
- Is it being reversed where you live?
- Who loses most in a car-first city?
Examiner follow-ups
- What about the people who depend on driving?
- Would it work in the cities of your country?
Examiner follow-ups
- Is a park a luxury or a necessity?
- What happens to public places when nobody wants to fund them?
Examiner follow-ups
- What's the difference between space that's public and space that's merely open to the public?
- Does it matter who is quietly excluded from a mall?
Examiner follow-ups
- Is that need stronger now than in the past?
- Should there be a legal right to live near a park?
Examiner follow-ups
- Whose job is it to fix that?
- Does anything change when it is fixed?
Examiner follow-ups
- Can you think of a place that brings out the best in people?
- And one that does the opposite?
Examiner follow-ups
- Is that a decline or just a change?
- What would make people keep showing up in person?
Examiner follow-ups
- Are the two really separable?
- Would your answer differ for a small town?
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
- Sustains two minutes on a single place by moving through registers — physical description, routine, people-watching, feeling — rather than repeating "it's very peaceful" in new orders.
- Part 1 answers about walking and relaxing flow at natural length: two to four sentences, always with a reason or detail attached.
- In Part 3, builds the city-design answers as small arguments — claim, reason, example — instead of piling up disconnected observations.
- Handles the either/or investment question decisively: picks, defends, concedes the cost, and doesn't stall in "both are important".
- Description never stalls the clock: even while picturing the place, the speech keeps moving with natural fillers of substance ("the thing you notice first is…").
Lexical Resource
- Place vocabulary that goes beyond 'beautiful': leafy, run-down, tucked away, bustling, a bit of a sun-trap, well kept, on its last legs.
- Urban Part 3 lexis used accurately: pedestrianised, green belt, amenities, footfall, gentrification, accessible — without turning into a planning textbook.
- Distinguishes public, communal, shared and open-to-the-public — a distinction one Part 3 question explicitly hunts for.
- People-watching language for the third bullet: regulars, dog-walkers, chess players, young families, older men who seem to live on that bench.
- Feeling vocabulary with gradation: at ease, recharged, oddly anonymous, part of something — not just 'relaxed' four times.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
- Present habitual structures carry the routine bullets: "I tend to go on Sunday mornings", "I'll usually grab a coffee and just watch".
- Spatial description under control: "there's a fountain in the middle, with plane trees running along both sides, and behind that a row of food stalls".
- Passives arrive naturally in the city questions: "the centre was pedestrianised a few years ago", "parks are being sold off for development".
- Second conditionals for the policy questions: "If parking were pushed underground, the square would breathe again."
- Comparatives and superlatives stay accurate under speed: "far livelier than", "one of the few places where", "the greener the street, the slower people walk".
Pronunciation
- Descriptive stretches get varied intonation — flat delivery kills a two-minute description faster than any grammar slip.
- Stress carries the key contrast of this test: "public space" versus "private space", "designed for cars" versus "designed for people".
- Place-name pronunciation is confident; hesitating over your own city's districts undermines an otherwise fluent description.
- The /w/ in walk and the vowel in park, calm, square are clear — this topic set leans on exactly those sounds.
- Lists of what you see there — "joggers, vendors, kids on bikes" — use natural list rhythm rather than identical stress on every item.
How to develop a Band 9 answer for this test
- Name and place it immediately — "the riverside promenade in my city", "the courtyard of the old library" — then give two or three visual details that let the examiner see it: what's at the centre, what's around the edges, what you hear.
- Cover the routine bullet with habits, not statistics — "most Saturday mornings, and the odd weekday evening when work has been heavy" sounds human; "I visit it 2–3 times per week" sounds like a report.
- Do the people bullet as a small gallery — three or four types you actually see there, sketched in a phrase each; this bullet is a gift for vocabulary and most candidates skip it entirely.
- Give the feeling bullet a mechanism — not just "it makes me feel calm" but why: the anonymity, the water, the fact that nobody there wants anything from you.
- Add one specific memory — a single small scene (a festival evening, a conversation with a stranger, the first visit) to break the description's present tense and show narrative range.
- Close on the explain line — why this place and not somewhere else: name the alternative you don't choose and what the winner has that it lacks.
“Shopping malls now serve as gathering places in many cities. Is a mall a real substitute for a public square?”
- Answer: take the position — no, not fully, because a mall is open to the public but not owned by it, and that difference shapes everything inside.
- Explain: give the mechanism — a mall exists to sell, so every bench, camera and rule filters for people who might spend; a square tolerates you whether you buy anything or not, and that unconditional welcome is the point of public space.
- Example: make it concrete — in fierce summers people do treat air-conditioned malls as the town square, yet teenagers get moved on by security for simply lingering, which would be absurd in an actual square.
- Alternative view: concede honestly — malls are safe, clean, cool and accessible, and where cities have neglected real squares, the mall is a rational refuge rather than a mistake by the people who gather there.
- Evaluate: land the judgement — the mall is a substitute the way a rented room is a substitute for a home: it works until you break a rule; cities that let it become the only option have quietly privatised their common life.
Common mistakes for this specific test
Your bedroom, a friend's café table, your gym — candidates regularly pick places that aren't public, then have nothing to say for the 'kinds of people you see there' bullet. Parks, squares, markets, riversides and libraries all fit; your sofa doesn't.
The card is about a place where you spend time — your routine, your bench, your reasons. A tourist-brochure description of the park's features, however fluent, leaves two of the four bullets untouched.
"What kinds of people you see there" is the easiest bullet to develop and the most skipped. A one-line gallery — joggers at dawn, chess players by the gate, families at weekends — adds thirty seconds of natural, high-scoring description.
This test invites the word constantly. Rotate the language: unwind, switch off, clear my head, recharge, take the edge off the day. Ten 'relaxing's in two minutes is a visible vocabulary ceiling.
The car-versus-people questions sit near the memorised 'environment' topic, and candidates swerve into exhaust fumes and global warming. These questions are about space, design and who streets are for — pollution is one thread, not the answer.
That's the start of a position, not a whole one. Who is the government, if not taxpayers? Band 8–9 answers see the real question — whether non-users should subsidise users — and take a view on it.
It isn't asking whether malls are nice. It's probing whether privately owned space can do a public square's job. Candidates who catch the ownership point — who's welcome, who's quietly excluded — immediately sound a band higher.
"It is a park in my city, it is very big, there are many trees" could describe ten thousand parks. Named streets, the market next door, the specific bench — verifiable-sounding detail is what makes description convincing and keeps it flowing.
"Nobody can know the future" is a refusal to play. The evidence is already visible — empty shops, streets converted to seating, events replacing retail. Read the trend you can see, then project it; that's all the question wants.
"Why you keep going back rather than somewhere else" begs for a comparison, and most candidates never name the somewhere else. One sentence — "the newer park is closer, but it's all concrete and noise" — answers the card's hardest part in one move.