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 journey that did not go as planned.
You should say:
- where you were going and why
- how you had planned to travel
- what went wrong along the way
- what you did when things went wrong
and explain how you felt during this journey, and whether you would do anything differently if it happened again.
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
- Which matters more — the length of the commute or how comfortable it is?
- Do people get used to it over time, or does it wear them down?
Examiner follow-ups
- Is that mainly about habit, or about how the city is built?
- What would it take to change that behaviour?
Examiner follow-ups
- Has that changed within your lifetime?
- Might it differ between smaller towns and big cities?
Examiner follow-ups
- Who benefits when a city has good public transport, apart from the passengers themselves?
- Is there a limit to how far fares should be subsidised?
Examiner follow-ups
- Is it a question of comfort, reliability, or image?
- Can you think of anywhere that has managed to solve this?
Examiner follow-ups
- What objections would drivers raise, and are they fair?
- Would this work equally well in very hot or very cold climates?
Examiner follow-ups
- Which approach do you think actually changes behaviour faster?
- Is it fair to charge people for driving into a city centre?
Examiner follow-ups
- Can you give an example of a city where you can see that connection?
- Does a stressful transport system make a society less patient in general?
Examiner follow-ups
- Where do you think all that traffic is coming from, if fewer people commute?
- Does this tell us anything about how hard travel behaviour is to predict?
Examiner follow-ups
- Which of those changes would benefit ordinary people most?
- Is there a risk that new transport technology mainly serves the wealthy?
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 journey as a story with a spine — plan, disruption, decision, outcome — rather than a list of complaints, and keeps going without the examiner rescuing it.
- Handles the change of direction naturally: "so at that point I had two options…" moves the story forward instead of stalling at the problem.
- In Part 3, develops a position on fares or car dependence across three or four sentences before pausing — the follow-up prompts should rarely be needed.
- Buys thinking time in English ("that's a tricky one, because it cuts both ways…") instead of long silences before the abstract policy questions.
- Links ideas with cause-and-effect connectors that fit transport talk — "which is exactly why", "as a result", "the knock-on effect is" — without sounding mechanical.
Lexical Resource
- Precise transport vocabulary used naturally: congestion, rush hour, connection, detour, delay, commuter, fare, route — not textbook terms like 'conveyance'.
- Collocations that native speakers actually use: "miss a connection", "stuck in traffic", "the last train home", "door-to-door journey", "peak fares".
- Part 3 register shifts to policy language without strain: subsidise, invest in infrastructure, car-dependent, pedestrianise, congestion charge.
- One or two natural idioms placed well — "we were cutting it fine", "back to square one" — beat a string of forced ones.
- Paraphrases smoothly when a word escapes: "one of those electric scooters you rent by the minute" is a Band 8 recovery, not a failure.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
- Past narrative tenses carry the Part 2 story: "we were halfway there when the engine gave out", "the bus had already left by the time we arrived".
- Third conditional and mixed conditionals appear where the cue card invites them: "If I'd checked the platform, we would have made it."
- Comparatives and measured quantifiers structure Part 3 answers: "far more reliable than", "a fraction of the cost", "nowhere near enough capacity".
- Concessive framing on the policy questions: "Even if fares were free, plenty of people would still drive, because…".
- Passives fit naturally when talking about cities being changed: "whole streets have been pedestrianised", "the line was extended in 2023".
Pronunciation
- The Part 2 story has audible drama — pace quickens slightly at the crisis, slows for the reflection — without becoming a performance.
- Stress lands on the contrast words the topic invites: "it should have taken two hours — it took SEVEN."
- Numbers, times and platform-style details are crisp and unambiguous; "thirteen" and "thirty" never blur.
- Multi-syllable topic words are stressed correctly: conGEStion, inFRAstructure, pedeSTRIan, reliaBIlity.
- Chunking supports the longer Part 3 sentences — a brief pause after "the real problem is…" lets the point land.
How to develop a Band 9 answer for this test
- Set-up — one or two sentences establishing the stakes: where you were headed, why it mattered that day, and what the plan was supposed to look like.
- The plan in motion — briefly show the journey starting normally, so the disruption lands with contrast: "everything was on schedule until…".
- The moment it went wrong — pin down the exact point of failure with concrete detail: the cancelled departure on the board, the road closed for a procession, the flat tyre an hour from anywhere.
- Your response — the decisions you made under pressure, including the option you rejected; this is where the story shows judgement, not just bad luck.
- How you felt — trace the arc honestly: irritation, then something else — resignation, unexpected calm, even enjoyment once you surrendered to it.
- Looking back — close by answering the cue card's final question head-on: what you'd do differently, or why you've decided some journeys are simply beyond planning.
“Some people argue that public transport should be cheap even if taxpayers who never use it have to fund it. What's your view?”
- Answer: commit to a position — e.g. yes, cheap fares are a fair use of general taxation, because everyone benefits whether they ride or not.
- Explain: give the mechanism — every full bus takes dozens of cars off the road, so even lifelong drivers gain through lighter traffic, cleaner air and workers who can actually reach their jobs.
- Example: anchor it in something concrete — cities that slashed fares, or a flat-rate monthly ticket like Germany's, saw ridership jump; compare that with cities where fares crept up and buses emptied out.
- Alternative view: concede genuinely — subsidies can be regressive if they prop up half-empty routes, and there's a reasonable argument that the money would do more good in service frequency than in ticket prices.
- Evaluate: land the judgement — cheap fares are necessary but not sufficient; the deeper point is that transport is infrastructure like street lighting, and nobody asks street lighting to turn a profit.
Common mistakes for this specific test
The cue card is about a journey that went wrong. Candidates spend ninety seconds on the destination, the hotel and the sightseeing, and mention the twelve-hour delay in one sentence. The disruption — and your response to it — is the story.
"We went to Manali and it was very nice" fails the card at the root. If nothing deviated from a plan, the examiner can't credit the 'what went wrong' or 'what you did' bullets. Pick a trip with a genuine derailment, however small.
Ten sentences about how terrible the airline was, and none about what you actually did next. The strongest tellings centre your decisions — rebook, wait, split up, give up — because decisions generate the language of judgement the examiner rewards.
"How do you get around?" — "By bus." You travel these streets every day; two sentences with a reason ("mostly by metro, because the last stretch to my office is a ten-minute walk and it beats sitting in traffic") is the natural register.
The questions here are about commuting, fares, street space and behaviour — not a general environment speech. A prepared paragraph about factories and global warming is visibly off-target and costs coherence marks.
There is no examiner-approved position. "Yes, ban cars" argued thinly scores below "honestly, I think punishing drivers backfires — here's why" argued well. The marks are in the reasoning, not the stance.
Transport talk lives on specifics: a forty-minute commute, fares that doubled in five years, a bus every four minutes. "Very far", "very expensive" and "many problems" flatten every answer into Band 6 territory.
"A travel" is a classic error on this exact topic. Travel is usually uncountable; you take a trip or describe a journey. Getting the topic's core nouns wrong in Part 2 is an avoidable dent in Lexical Resource.
Under pressure, candidates slide into "so we are waiting and the bus is not coming". The narrative tenses — was waiting, had already left, would have made it — are precisely what this cue card exists to sample.
The future-of-mobility question rewards grounded reasoning — driverless fleets changing car ownership, e-bikes eating short trips, cities pricing road space — not science fiction. One plausible change explained beats five fantasies listed.