Describe a situation in which you had to be very patient.
Visa queues, hospital waiting rooms, teaching a grandparent to video-call, growing anything. The card is about self-management, so the inner monologue is the content.
The task card
Describe a situation in which you had to be very patient.
You should say:
- what the situation was
- why patience was needed
- how you managed to stay patient
and explain what the result was.
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
Choose a wait with stakes — a result, a person, a harvest — so the patience costs something. Boredom alone gives you nothing to say.
The third point is the heart: name your actual techniques. Counting floors, reframing the delay, deciding not to check the phone. Real strategies are specific.
Close the loop with the result and one line on what the wait taught you — even if the lesson is that you are less patient than you thought.
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.
Situations that genuinely test patience
- Caring for someone ill or elderly, where the timescale is not yours to set
- Bureaucracy: a claim, an appeal, a repair, a dispute with no clear end date
- Teaching or working with someone much slower than you at something
Why patience was actually required
- Because acting faster would have made it worse, not just because it was slow
- Because the delay was somebody else's and you had no leverage at all
- Because losing your temper would have cost you the thing you were waiting for
How you managed it — the marks are here
- The concrete tactics: a fixed check-in day, stopping yourself chasing, keeping a log
- The person who talked you down, or the thing you did instead of reacting
- Admit the moment you nearly lost it — the answer is unconvincing without one
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.
- WHAT — insurance claim after the flat flooded, 7 months
- WHY PATIENCE — every angry call reset it to a new handler
- HOW — one call a week, same day, written log of every ref number
- RESULT — paid in full eventually; the log won it
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 situation that tested me most was an insurance claim after the flat below mine flooded and took my kitchen with it. It took seven months from start to settlement. Patience was required for a very specific reason, which took me a while to understand. It wasn't simply that the process was slow. It was that every time I escalated — every angry phone call, every complaint — the case got reassigned to a new handler, and the new handler started by reading the file from the beginning. So the natural response, which is to push harder, made it demonstrably worse. I learned that the expensive way, because I lost my temper properly once in about month three, and that particular outburst cost me around three weeks. After that I ran it completely differently. I called once a week, on Tuesday mornings, whether or not there was anything to say. I was relentlessly polite, to the point of being slightly odd about it. And I kept a written log of every call — the date, the name of the person, the reference number, and one line on what they told me. That log ended up being about four pages. How did I stay patient? Partly by moving the goalposts for myself: I stopped measuring success by whether the claim had progressed, because that was outside my control, and started measuring it by whether I had made the Tuesday call. That was entirely within my control, and it turned seven months of helplessness into a small weekly task. The result was that it was paid in full, including a contribution towards eating out, which I hadn't expected. And it was the log that did it — when the final handler tried to say that a particular commitment had never been made, I could tell her who had made it and on what date. Being calm wasn't a virtue in that situation. It was, quite straightforwardly, the strategy that worked.
Why this works: The second bullet is answered with a real mechanism — escalation caused reassignment — rather than 'it was frustrating', which makes the need for patience genuinely persuasive. The tactics are concrete and repeatable, and the admission of losing his temper once, with a measured cost, keeps the answer from sounding saintly. Reframing the goal from outcome to process is a genuinely thoughtful point, and the final line gives the answer a sharp, unsentimental close.
Useful vocabulary for this topic
- there was nothing to do but wait
Sets the situation cleanly.
- I talked myself down
Idiomatic self-management.
- the waiting was the hardest part
Familiar but effective when earned.
- in hindsight, the delay did me a favour
A mature closing observation.
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.
- it dragged on for months
- “It dragged on for seven months, and for most of that there was simply nothing to do.”
- to bite my tongue
- “I had to bite my tongue more times than I can count.”
- to lose my temper
- “I lost my temper exactly once, and it set the whole thing back by three weeks.”
- to keep a lid on it
- “Keeping a lid on it was genuinely the hardest part of the whole process.”
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.
Patience
Example questions
- 1In what situations do people need to be most patient?
- 2How can someone learn to be more patient?
- 3Do you think patience is valued as much as it once was?
Dealing with organisations
Example questions
- 1Why do people often find it difficult to deal with large organisations?
- 2How should companies handle complaints?
- 3Do you agree that people who complain get better results?
More on how this family of cards is discussed: Events and experiences. Model answers for Part 3: Part 3 questions and answers.