Events and experiences
Experience cards are the family where narrative tenses earn or lose you a band. The structure is not four bullet points, it is a story: a situation, a complication, what you did, and how it turned out. Candidates who narrate score well almost automatically, because a story naturally produces past continuous, past perfect, and reported speech without you having to think about grammar at all.
What the examiner is listening for
Control of narrative tenses under time pressure, and whether the story has a shape. An examiner can hear the difference between a sequence of events and an actual story with a turning point.
How to spend the preparation minute
You get exactly sixty seconds with a pencil and a sheet of paper. This is how to divide them on a card of this shape.
- 0:00–0:15
Find the turning point
Before anything else, decide the moment the story turns — the point where things changed. Everything else is built around it.
- 0:15–0:30
Set the scene
Note when, where, and who was there. Two or three words each. This becomes your opening twenty seconds.
- 0:30–0:45
The complication
Write what went wrong or what was at stake. Without tension there is no story and you will finish early.
- 0:45–1:00
Outcome and reflection
Note the result plus one sentence of what you took from it. The last bullet is almost always 'explain how you felt' or 'explain why it mattered'.
Language that transfers across every card here
- it was touch and go for a while
Idiom for a period when the outcome was genuinely uncertain.
- out of the blue
For something that happened with no warning.
- in hindsight
Signals the reflection section; a clean way to reach the final bullet.
- I was in two minds about it
For a decision you found genuinely difficult.
- it all worked out in the end
Natural closing line for a resolved story.
- the penny dropped
Idiom for the moment you finally understood something.
- I had my heart set on it
For something you badly wanted.
Grammar this family pulls out of you
Grammatical range is a quarter of your Speaking band. These structures arise naturally on these cards, so you do not have to force them in.
- Past continuous for the background
- “We were still queueing outside when the announcement came.”
- Past perfect for what came before
- “By then I had already rewritten the whole thing twice.”
- Reported speech
- “She told me there was nothing more I could do that night.”
- Third conditional for reflection
- “If I had left ten minutes earlier, none of it would have happened.”
What costs people marks on these cards
- Telling the events in order with no tension, so the answer feels like a diary entry.
- Slipping into the present tense halfway through. Decide your tense in the prep minute and stay in it.
- Compressing the whole story into thirty seconds and then having nothing left. Slow the middle down; the complication is where the detail lives.
Cue cards in this family
15 cards- EventsDescribe an outdoor event where the weather changed your experience.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
- EventsDescribe a community celebration that brought different people together.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
- EventsDescribe a time when you had to wait for something important.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
- Life decisionsDescribe a piece of advice that helped you make a good decision.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
- ExperiencesDescribe a time you received good news.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
- ExperiencesDescribe a time you solved a problem in a clever or unusual way.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
- ExperiencesDescribe a situation in which you had to be very patient.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
- EventsDescribe an occasion when you arrived late and it mattered.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
- Life decisionsDescribe a decision that was difficult because both choices had something to offer.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
- EventsDescribe a sporting event you watched that you found exciting.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
- EventsDescribe a surprise you planned for someone else.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
- ExperiencesDescribe something you did for the first time as an adult.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
- ExperiencesDescribe a mistake you made that you learned something from.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
- ExperiencesDescribe a time you had to speak in front of a group of people.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
- EventsDescribe a journey that did not go according to plan.Ideas, model answer & Part 3
Where Part 3 usually goes after these cards
The examiner follows your long turn with a four to five minute discussion on the same theme, worked from two related discussion topics. On this family the discussion tends to travel in these directions.
- Whether people learn more from success or from things going wrong
- How societies mark important events and why that is changing
- Whether young people today are more or less patient than previous generations
- How much of a good outcome is planning and how much is luck
- The value of shared public experiences in an age of individual entertainment
The timing you are rehearsing against
- 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.