Describe a time you solved a problem in a clever or unusual way.
Small and real beats big and vague: a locked door, a double-booked venue, a document lost the night before a deadline. The cleverness is in the workaround.
The task card
Describe a time you solved a problem in a clever or unusual way.
You should say:
- what the problem was
- what you did
- why you chose that solution
and explain how you felt afterwards.
Now say it yourself
Record your own two minutes on this card and have it transcribed and marked against the Speaking criteria. Practising is free; the band estimate is part of Pro.
Record my answerHow long you have
- 1 minute
Preparation
The examiner hands you the card, paper and a pencil. Make notes — a few words per cue point, never sentences.
- 1–2 minutes
Your long turn
Speak until the examiner stops you at two minutes. Finishing early is the most common self-inflicted problem in Part 2.
- 1–2 questions
Rounding off
The examiner may ask one or two short follow-up questions, then moves straight into the Part 3 discussion on the same theme.
Part 2 takes three to four minutes in total. The whole Speaking test runs 11 to 14 minutes across three parts, and Part 3 that follows lasts four to five minutes.
How to approach this card
Set up the constraint clearly — what made the obvious solution impossible. The cleverness only lands if the examiner understands the trap first.
Narrate the workaround step by step in past tenses; this card is a natural showcase for sequencing language: at first, once I realised, in the end.
The feeling can be modest — relief, quiet satisfaction, the urge to tell someone. A small true feeling outranks a triumphant fake one.
Ideas you can actually use
Three angles on this card. Pick the one closest to something real in your own life — invented material is what makes candidates hesitate at ninety seconds.
Domestic and workplace problems both work
- A locked-out situation, a broken appliance, a lost item found by reasoning
- A scheduling or logistics problem solved by rearranging rather than adding effort
- A social problem — two people who would not speak, solved indirectly
What makes it 'clever'
- You solved a different problem from the one you were given
- You used something for a purpose it was not designed for
- You removed the need for the solution entirely rather than executing it better
Structure it as a story
- State the constraint clearly — no money, no time, no access, nobody available
- Describe the failed first attempt, which makes the second one land
- End on the honest feeling, which is often amusement rather than pride
What your one minute of notes should look like
Not sentences — a few words per cue point. This is the level of detail sixty seconds actually buys you, and it is enough to speak from for two minutes.
- PROBLEM — team kept missing a weekly report; reminders didn't work
- TRIED — more reminders, a checklist. Nothing.
- DID — moved the report to be produced automatically from data we already had
- WHY/FELT — solved the wrong problem first; slightly embarrassed it took 5 months
Model answer
Speak your own answer first. Examiners are trained to spot memorised speeches and mark them down — use this to study structure, pacing and naturalness, never to recite.
Show the model answer
The problem was at work, and it sounds trivial until you have lived with it for five months. Every Friday a report had to be compiled by six different people, and every Friday at least two of them forgot. It was late almost every week for the best part of half a year. My first attempts were completely conventional and completely useless. I set up automated reminders. Then earlier reminders. Then a shared checklist, then a Thursday nudge, then — and I'm not proud of this — a small amount of public shaming in a group chat. Compliance improved for about two weeks and then went straight back. What I now understand is that I was treating it as a discipline problem, and it was never a discipline problem. What I eventually did was go and look at what the six of them were actually being asked to type in. And about eighty per cent of it already existed somewhere else — it was in the ticketing system, it was in the calendar, it was in the sales tool. They were being asked to copy things out by hand that a machine already knew. So instead of trying to make people do the task reliably, I got most of the task deleted. We pulled what we could automatically and cut the human part down to two free-text boxes: what went wrong this week, and what you need from someone else. Why that solution? Because a task that takes ninety seconds doesn't need reminders. The reason it was being forgotten was that it was forty minutes of boring copying, and no amount of nudging fixes that. How did I feel afterwards? Genuinely pleased, but mostly a bit embarrassed. The right question — why is this task so unpleasant that six intelligent people avoid it — had been available to me from week one, and I spent five months answering the wrong one instead.
Why this works: The structure is a proper story: a clear constraint, a sequence of escalating failures, then the reframing. The cleverness is defined explicitly — solving a different problem rather than executing the same one better — which is exactly what 'clever or unusual' invites. The feelings bullet lands on embarrassment rather than pride, which is both more honest and more memorable, and the final sentence names the lesson without preaching it.
Useful vocabulary for this topic
- the obvious option was off the table
Frames the constraint neatly.
- a workaround
The exact word for a clever temporary fix.
- it was not elegant, but it worked
Self-aware and idiomatic.
- quietly pleased with myself
Honest register for a small victory.
The same phrases in a full sentence
A phrase list is only useful if you know how the words sit around it. Say each of these aloud once before you attempt the card.
- to think outside the box
- “It needed someone to think outside the box, which took me an embarrassingly long time.”
- a workaround
- “It started as a temporary workaround and ended up being the permanent solution.”
- to get round the problem
- “In the end I got round the problem instead of trying to solve it head-on.”
- it did the trick
- “It was not elegant, but it did the trick.”
Part 3 discussion
After your long turn the examiner moves into a four to five minute discussion on the same theme, working from two related discussion topics with about three questions each. The first stays close to your own experience; the second widens out. Answer with reasons and examples, not one-line replies.
Solving problems
Example questions
- 1What kinds of problems do people face at work?
- 2Is it better to solve a problem alone or with other people?
- 3How important is it to be able to think of unusual solutions?
Learning from mistakes
Example questions
- 1Do people learn more from success or from failure?
- 2Can you suggest why organisations repeat the same mistakes?
- 3Should schools teach children how to approach problems?
More on how this family of cards is discussed: Events and experiences. Model answers for Part 3: Part 3 questions and answers.