Describe a time when you had to wait for something important.
A card about waiting for exam results, a hospital appointment, a visa or a delayed train. Anticipation and relief give you a ready-made emotional shape.
The task card
Describe a time when you had to wait for something important.
You should say:
- what you were waiting for
- where you were during the wait
- how you passed the time
and explain how you felt when the waiting ended.
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
Say what you were waiting for and why it mattered in the opening sentences — university results, news of a job, the arrival of someone you had missed. The stakes are everything here: the listener must understand what would have been lost if the answer was no.
For 'where you were' and 'how you passed the time', narrate the wait as it happened: refreshing a webpage every thirty seconds, pacing a hospital corridor, rereading the same page without taking it in. A strong answer includes the moment you stopped being able to distract yourself.
The common mistake is compressing the ending — 'and then it arrived and I was happy'. The final bullet asks about the moment the waiting ended, so give it time: the sound of the letterbox, the first line of the email, whether relief came before joy. That contrast is what lifts the answer.
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.
Waits with real stakes
- Exam or test results, a visa decision, a medical result, a job offer
- Waiting for someone to arrive — a delayed flight, a late relative, a hospital discharge
- A wait where you could do nothing at all, which is what makes it worth describing
How the waiting actually felt
- The strategies: refreshing a page, deliberately not looking, keeping busy badly
- The physical side — not eating, not sleeping, checking your phone at three in the morning
- Who you told and who you did not, which is often the most revealing detail
The moment it ended
- Where you were and what you were doing when you found out
- Your first reaction, which is often anticlimactic rather than dramatic
- What the wait taught you about your own tolerance for uncertainty
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 — visa decision, 11 weeks, no updates
- WHY IMPORTANT — job start date + flat deposit both depended on it
- WAIT — checked portal 3x a day, told nobody for 6 wks
- END — email at 4pm on a Tuesday at work; felt flat, not happy
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
I'd like to talk about waiting for my university admission results, three years ago, which is still the longest single day of my life. My whole plan depended on it — the course, the city, honestly a version of the future I'd already half moved into in my head — and the results were due online at nine in the morning. I was at home, in the kitchen, because I'd decided being around family would be calming. It wasn't. My mum kept making tea nobody drank, and my dad kept saying 'no news is no news', which doesn't even mean anything. How did I pass the time? Badly. The portal went down at nine — thousands of us refreshing at once, I suppose — so what should've been one moment stretched into nearly four hours. I tried everything: went for a walk and turned back after two streets, watched half an episode of something without absorbing a single scene, cleaned a cupboard that didn't need cleaning. By midday I'd given up pretending to be distracted and just sat there refreshing every thirty seconds like it was a nervous tic. When the page finally loaded and the word 'Offer' appeared, the odd thing is I didn't feel joy first — I felt this enormous physical relief, like putting down a bag I'd been carrying for months. My legs actually went a bit shaky. The happiness arrived maybe ten minutes later, with my mum crying into the phone to my aunt. And since then I've never trusted anyone who says waiting builds character.
Why this works: The four-hour portal crash turns a familiar topic into a specific story, and the failed distractions — the abandoned walk, the pointless cupboard — dramatise impatience instead of naming it. Crucially, the ending gets the time the strategy asks for: relief arriving before joy is a precise, believable emotional observation, and the wry final line lands like real speech.
Useful vocabulary for this topic
- on edge
Nervous and unable to relax while waiting.
- to count down the days
To mark time until an important event.
- a nail-biting wait
Informal but natural for tense anticipation.
- time dragged
Time seemed to pass very slowly.
- a huge relief
The standard collocation for tension ending well.
- worth the wait
Natural closing phrase when the outcome justified the delay.
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.
- the waiting was the worst part
- “Honestly, the waiting was the worst part — worse than the decision could have been.”
- to be left in limbo
- “You are left in limbo, because you cannot plan anything and you cannot stop thinking about it.”
- it dragged on
- “It dragged on for eleven weeks with no updates at all.”
- a weight off my shoulders
- “When it finally came through it was an enormous weight off my shoulders.”
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.
Waiting
Example questions
- 1What kinds of things do people commonly have to wait for?
- 2How do people usually pass the time while they are waiting?
- 3Do you think people are less patient than they used to be?
Services and delays
Example questions
- 1Why do official processes often take so long?
- 2How should organisations keep people informed while they wait?
- 3Do you agree that technology has made people expect instant results?
More on how this family of cards is discussed: Events and experiences. Model answers for Part 3: Part 3 questions and answers.