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 art or a performance that impressed you.
You should say:
- what it was and where you saw it
- who created or performed it
- what it looked or sounded like
- how you came to see it
and explain why it impressed you so much, and whether it changed how you think about art.
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 that spending easier to defend in rich countries than in poorer ones?
- What would actually be lost if that funding stopped?
Examiner follow-ups
- What do children get from art lessons that other subjects can't give them?
- Who should make that decision — parents, teachers, or the government?
Examiner follow-ups
- Can you think of a place that proves your point?
- Does this matter more to some generations than others?
Examiner follow-ups
- Does it matter whether a human or a machine made something, if the result moves people?
- How might working artists feel about this?
Examiner follow-ups
- What happens when those three disagree?
- Has the internet changed who gets to make that judgement?
Examiner follow-ups
- Does charging change who walks through the door?
- How else could museums pay their bills?
Examiner follow-ups
- Does the artist gain or lose anything when this happens?
- Should there be limits on treating art as a financial asset?
Examiner follow-ups
- Is lasting fame a reliable sign of quality?
- Could something created today still matter in five hundred years?
Examiner follow-ups
- Where would you draw the line, if anywhere?
- Has your view on this changed over time?
Examiner follow-ups
- What might people start paying for that they currently take for granted?
- Is there any part of art you think machines will never reach?
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 the Part 2 description of one artwork or performance without running dry — moving from what it was, to what it looked or sounded like, to why it landed.
- Uses natural connectors for describing an experience ("the strange thing was", "what really got me", "even now") rather than listing features mechanically.
- Handles the shift from describing a painting to debating public funding in Part 3 without the pace collapsing.
- Extends abstract answers unprompted — the examiner shouldn't have to ask "why?" after every response about museums or funding.
- Buys thinking time in English ("that's a genuinely hard one, because…") instead of long silences before questions like who decides what counts as art.
Lexical Resource
- Precise topic vocabulary: exhibition, sculpture, composition, striking, moving, breathtaking, curator, masterpiece, heritage.
- Real collocations — "it took my breath away", "a permanent collection", "public funding for the arts" — not invented pairings.
- Distinguishes near-synonyms accurately: impressive vs moving vs beautiful; a performance vs a show vs an exhibition.
- Can talk about reactions to art with range: it stayed with me, it grew on me, I couldn't look away, it left me cold.
- Moves into Part 3 register smoothly — subsidise, accessibility, cultural identity, commercialisation — without sounding like a memorised essay.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
- Past narrative under control in Part 2: "I'd never seen anything like it", "we had been queuing for an hour when…".
- Descriptive relative clauses that add detail without derailing: "the dancer, who must have been in her sixties, moved like…".
- Conditionals for the funding and free-entry debates: "If museums charged nothing, they would have to…".
- Concessive structures for balanced Part 3 answers: "Even though I see why hospitals come first, …".
- Passives used naturally where the agent is unknown or unimportant: "it was painted over", "the piece is being restored".
Pronunciation
- Clearly intelligible throughout — accent is fine; swallowed endings on words like "sculpture" and "exhibition" are not.
- Stress lands on the evaluative words the topic invites: "it was genuinely unforgettable", not flat delivery.
- Intonation lifts during the description of the artwork — a monotone account of something that supposedly impressed you undermines the content.
- Multi-syllable topic words stressed correctly: exHIbition, phoTOgraphy, conTEMporary, inVESTment.
- Chunks connected speech naturally ("piece_of_art", "work_of_art") rather than word-by-word delivery.
How to develop a Band 9 answer for this test
- Opening / context — name the piece or performance and where you saw it in one or two sentences, so the listener can picture the setting immediately.
- The creator — say who made or performed it and how much you knew about them beforehand; "I'd never heard of her" is just as usable as naming someone famous.
- Sensory description — spend real time on what it actually looked or sounded like; two or three concrete details (scale, colour, a single repeated note) beat ten vague adjectives.
- How you came to see it — the accident or plan that put you in front of it; a chance encounter often makes the better story.
- The moment of impact — pinpoint when it stopped being just something to look at; describe your physical reaction if there was one ("I realised I'd been holding my breath").
- Reflection — close by answering the cue card's final question directly: what it changed about how you see art, even if the honest answer is "not everything, but this one thing".
“Why do you think governments spend public money on art when there are hospitals and schools to fund?”
- Answer: take a position — e.g. because a society that only funds survival stops being somewhere people want to live.
- Explain: give the mechanism — art builds shared identity and draws tourism and investment, so the spending partly pays for itself, and the sums involved are tiny next to health budgets.
- Example: one concrete case — cities that invested in a landmark gallery or concert hall and saw the surrounding area revive, the way Bilbao did after the Guggenheim opened.
- Alternative view: concede genuinely — when a health system is visibly failing, asking taxpayers to fund an opera house is a hard sell, and the people who benefit from subsidised art are often the better-off.
- Evaluate: land the judgement — the real question isn't whether to fund art but which art, and funding that widens access earns its place more easily than funding that subsidises the already-comfortable.
Common mistakes for this specific test
Candidates spend two minutes on the museum building, the ticket queue and the café, and thirty seconds on the actual painting or performance. The cue card is about the work itself — the setting is one sentence of context, not the story.
"It was amazing, really beautiful, so impressive" tells the examiner nothing and shows no lexical range. One concrete detail — the size of the canvas, the silence before the final note — is worth five empty superlatives.
Choosing the Mona Lisa because it feels safe backfires when you can't say anything about it beyond "her smile is mysterious". A local street mural you actually stood in front of gives you far more to say.
The explain line carries the marks. A perfect description that never gets to the personal impact leaves the card half-answered — the examiner needs the "because", not just the "what".
"Do you enjoy drawing?" answered with "No, I'm bad at it" is a dead end. Even a negative answer extends naturally: what you do instead, when you stopped, whether you'd like to pick it up again.
The question is about what counts as art and what we value in human creativity — not how image generators work. Jargon about models and datasets earns nothing; a view about creativity does.
"Art is important but hospitals are also important" with no follow-through is a Band 6 pattern. Commit — "I'd fund it, and here's the condition I'd attach" — and then concede the other side properly.
Part 3 asks about societies in general. Anchoring every answer in one city you know is fine as illustration, but generalise beyond it — "in most big cities", "wherever entry is free" — or the answers stay Part 1-sized.
The topic invites it. Vary the reference: the piece, the work, the exhibition, that performance, creative work, the arts. Lexical Resource is scored on exactly this kind of flexibility.
Examiners hear the same rehearsed paragraph about art expressing emotions and reflecting culture several times a day. The questions here are sharper — funding trade-offs, AI, art as investment — and a stock speech simply doesn't answer them.