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Describe A Difficult Decision That You Made And Had A Good Result: IELTS Speaking Cue Card

You should say

  • What was the decision?
  • When did you make the decision?
  • How long did it take you to make the decision?
  • Explain why it was a difficult decision to make.
Show all 96 answers

Cue 1:What was the decision?

  • Clearly state the decision you made, providing context about the situation.
  • Mention the potential outcomes of the decision to highlight its significance.

Example

The difficult decision I made was to leave my stable job in a multinational company to pursue my passion for photography. I had been working there for over three years, and while it provided financial security, I felt unfulfilled.

Cue 2:When did you make the decision?

  • Specify the time frame when you made this decision, such as a particular month or year.
  • Share any relevant events that led up to this decision to give it more context.

Example

I made this decision in early 2022, after attending a photography workshop that reignited my passion. The workshop made me realize that I wanted to turn my hobby into a career.

Cue 3:How long did it take you to make the decision?

  • Discuss the duration it took you to arrive at this decision, emphasizing any internal conflict.
  • Mention any discussions you had with friends or family that influenced your decision-making process.

Example

It took me about two months to make this decision. I spent countless nights weighing the pros and cons, and I also spoke to my family and friends, who encouraged me to follow my dreams.

Cue 4:Explain why it was a difficult decision to make.

  • Describe the fears or concerns you had about making this decision.
  • Explain how the fear of failure or uncertainty contributed to the difficulty of the decision.

Example

This was a difficult decision because I was afraid of financial instability and the fear of failing in a competitive field. Leaving a secure job felt risky, and I worried about what others would think of my choice.

Conclusion

    Example

    In the end, I took the leap and started my own photography business. It was challenging at first, but I am now thriving and feel more fulfilled than ever. This decision taught me the importance of following my passion and believing in myself.

    Following this structure will ensure you cover all the essential points while providing a clear and engaging response to the cue card topic.

    Tips to answer this Cue Card

    1: Vague Responses

    Providing vague or unclear answers can make it difficult for the examiner to understand your experience. Specific details help create a clearer picture of your decision-making process.

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    Tip

    Use specific examples and details when describing your decision to make your response more engaging and informative.

    2: Rushing Through the Explanation

    Rushing through your explanation can lead to missing important points. It may also make your answer sound unstructured and less convincing.

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    Tip

    Take your time to explain each cue clearly, ensuring you cover all aspects of the decision-making process.

    Neglecting Emotional Impact

    Ignoring the emotional aspects of your decision can make your response less relatable. Emotions often play a significant role in difficult decisions.

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    Tip

    Include how you felt during the decision-making process to add depth and connect with the examiner.

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    I like to taste different types of cuisine. Here I would like to talk about my favorite dish at my traditional festival of Onam which is Sadya. Sadya is popular in my city. We are experimenting these cuisines on Onam festival day. Onam is a famous festival in my city. All family members get together in my home and we make a delicious Sadya. There are many ingredients includes that Sadya. Moreover, we make a big feast that day as well as we create a lot of memories together and we wear that day the traditional dress called Sari and men wear the Dhotis. That festival is really important to us because the whole day we are conducting different kinds of games at our homes and all the family members came together. It's a memorable day in my life. This is the festival. We are making the Sambar and Aviyal. These all the kinds of foods are making with the vegetables.
    Talk about a toy you liked in your childhood
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    Anonymous student Band 8

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    The toy which I liked in my childhood was a panda doll, which makes me pleasant and makes me more blush. The pandas are the most beautiful creatures of the world, which looks gigantic and has pooshy cheeks and they are like stars in the clouds and they dream in me. Furthermore, these have been given by my father. My father is a very very beautiful artistic person, who makes me think of that. Every day you will face every difficulties and make you suffer and move forward. Pandas are always seen in Japanese countries. It is my lifelong dream to visit a Japanese country and click a photo with the original pandas, which makes sounds better.
    Describe a time you were in a place where you didn't know the local language
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    Anonymous student Band 6.5

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    As India is a very large country full of diversity, so there are many places which have their own language and speak their native language. The place which I visited and I didn't know about their language was Leladakh, which is about 300 km away from my hometown and it is a very good place as it consists of different kind of trees, animals and have many scenic views and I visited over there last year in summers as it was the best time to visit because it has many, it was cold over there and we had summers in our area so it was the best time to visit over there and I went over there with my whole family.
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    Anonymous student Band 7

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    When I was a kid, I had a little pencil box which had these four buttons which gave the pencil box an operative use. When you press the button, the box would open up. When you press the second button, a little part of it would slide out. Basically it was just a little electronical and a fun thing to have and I owned it when I was in 6th. One day after break, I was standing and talking there with one of my friends and another friend of mine was running through the hallway and accidentally she pushed my shoulder and my pencil box hit the ground and it broke into multiple pieces to the point that it was not functional anymore.
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    It Ends With Us is a book I read recently. It's by the author Colleen Hoare. It's mainly a story about two teenagers, Atlas and Lily, and how they just handle their life going through high school, adolescence, and just domestic violence at home. Both of them come from very, very different families. However, they have one common determining factor between them, which is domestic violence. The abuse that they've seen their moms go through is just insane, and they connect through that on a different level. They're actually in the same high school, but they never speak to each other until Atlas actually crashes into an empty house next to Lily's villa. When Atlas is homeless and he doesn't have anywhere to go, he just comes and breaks into the house next to Lily's, and Lily helps him with all the daily necessities like clothes and food, medicines and stuff. Furthermore, their friendship blossoms into love, but it doesn't really fructify as Atlas has to leave. This book really gave me a lot of knowledge about domestic abuse and how to deal with it.

    All Answers

    Here are all the answers by real-users practicing speaking for IELTS Cue Cards on our IELTS Prep App.

    Band 6-7

    In the beginning of my internship, I started looking for alternate options because I didn't want to become a dentist. It wasn't in my books. It didn't feel like being me, so I started considering various other options. My father helped me a lot actually. Once he came to me and he said, okay there is this degree in designing. Do you want to do that? Because they consider people from various backgrounds and I researched about it. I did a lot of research and then got to know that this is what I want. This is where my heart lies. I was like on cloud nine. But then when I tried looking up at the websites of the universities, they were mostly expecting us to have a design background to apply for the master's. So I was scared. I was in stress. I was under stress. I didn't know what to do but I knew one thing to follow my heart. So I made the decision. I left everything and chose my passion. That is where I differ from others I feel. Although everybody around me was saying, why do you want to do that? You're already a university topper. Why do you want to change dreams? But I didn't feel like that is me. Okay yeah, I'm getting money. I'm doing well in that. But where does my conscience lie? I say in art. That is why I chose design and it took me about six to eight months to get a hard decision, hard rock decision on to this. That was that phase was really stressful for me. I couldn't

    Band 6-7

    In my life I had different difficult situations and in those situations I had to take very difficult decisions but eventually they gave me a good result. I still remember one decision which I took during my 11th grade in my school. When I was 11 when I was in 11th grade I had two choices one was to study in the school itself or the second was to study and also prepare for the National Engineering exam. It was a difficult decision because it would be very hectic schedule after that if I had chosen to prepare for an engineering exam along with my studies but I chose that. I was enrolled into one of the institutions in our city. It was a good Institute. Eventually my schedule was very tight. I had to go to school in the morning and after doing the classes in the school I had to go back to the coaching classes at that Institute and those classes were held till late night and after coming back I was really burnt out and but I always had a smile on my face because I was pretty much sure that I'm preparing for a good course and it would lead to a good decision. After doing this for around one year I gave my final engineering exam and I was passed at that time I was over the moon and because I was selected into one of the most premier institution of the country.

    Band 6-7

    One of the difficult decisions that I had to take, I would say was choosing between whether to pursue a degree, my bachelor's in medical or whether to pursue in engineering. The reason that it was very difficult for me was that my father was willing, wanted me to take up engineering as my higher studies. But my mother was very much interested and very much wanted me to take up medical. In the end, I decided to go with engineering and I would say that it turned out really good as in my later years, in my fourth year when pursuing electronics engineering, I started with a project that was implementation of SNN on FPGA. In this project, I had incorporated biomedical signals into my model and that allowed me to open up a new line for my master's that would be in biomedical engineering and this allowed me to somewhat be in between of both medical and engineering branches. In that project, I remember we faced a lot of problems. One of the biggest problem that we faced was of not having enough GPU, we were running our code on Kaggle, but there was a runtime limitation of 12 hours on it. So we had to buy a pro version of Google Colab and that was also very difficult because in India, the Google Colab version was not available.

    Band 6-7

    Hi, so beginning with this incident happened back in 2022 when I was in the final year of my bachelors. After the completion of COVID, I had one year left of my bachelor course to study and get distinction. Apparently, two semesters were left over. I tried my best to get good grades. Furthermore, I along with my friends decided that we will focus on having a group study. Collectiveness and group study will always help us. But a major issue for me at that time was traveling to far off place and leaving at a totally different location just for reading. Also as COVID had passed recently because of the pandemic, it was fearful to stay out of home leaving at an unknown place and studying. But I and one of my friends, we decided to sacrifice few of this comfort of home and work hard, study and get good marks. All praise and thanks to our curator who helped a lot in getting good results. I almost lived for more than 20 days out of my home and worked at a different location and it was a totally unknown place to me. Thereby, I along with my friends studied hard and when the results came, I and all my family members all were happy that I got distinction in my bachelor's.

    Band 6-7

    Okay, so one of the most difficult decision which I took in a recent past would be to start exercising. Now, it's a good thing that I started working out more but I would rather say it was a very difficult decision because I am someone who is inherently lazy. I like to sit on bed, rot on the couch the entire day, sit on a desk, do my work on the computer and not move an inch. I would even ask people to bring things to me instead of moving or going there. So yeah, it was indeed a very challenging task for me to decide that I have to move around a much and I have to start exercising. It took me quite a while and a lot of pushing from my friends, from my family but finally one day I chose to like, no, it's no more, I would start working out tomorrow. And ever since I have been doing, I feel more free, I feel less fatigued at times and it gives me a better, it helps me be in a better mood throughout the day. Along with, ever since I started working out, I have started being, I have been more engaged in outdoor activities. I go on hiking, I go on trekking with my friends, I go swimming, bicycling around and yeah, it gives me a lot more, brings a lot more activeness in my life which was previously missing and yeah, certainly brings a lot of health benefits associated with it. If I have, thinking back, if the decision now does not feel as difficult as it was but the time I made it and the situations were like that or the environmental pressures were such that it was really a tough decision for me to make.

    Band 6-7

    A difficult decision that makes me struggle in starting but had a good result at the end. I will say sleeping on time and waking up on time is really difficult for me as I used to scroll all day on Instagram and the release thing. So my dopamine levels were really high at the time when I scrolled and I can't sleep properly so I've seen a pattern in which I was awake till 3am and I think that's the time when I decided to quit all this thing and I've decided a new sleep cycle in which I used to wake up at 6am and will sleep at around 11pm. By this I think I've improved my discipline and I think this is the only essential thing in our life to do some things on time because when we wake up on time I think all other things will be on the same time for example my digestion, my mood, my everything around me is going on time so I really enjoy living it. So now I can't go back to my 3am sessions at night but yeah it improves very much in me and I think everyone should try it once for just 15 days and we all can see changes in ourselves. Thank you.

    Band 6-7

    term fun Friday so after so every every month there is a lot and two names of analysts are drawn from that which will be potential candidates to host the event so last month I got my name drawn at the lot and I was given the choice if I want to host the event being an introvert it was it is very difficult for me to interact with such huge number of people and in the event I will be hosting around I was supposed to host around 100 to 150 people and it was quite a daunting task for me however I took a leap of faith and I decided that I need to face my fears and personally develop myself so I agreed to the terms and I agreed to host the event for at starting I was very nervous like in how to organize the event and of that scale I was very scared but I took some steps I began practicing practicing hosting for two to three weeks prior and every day I would ask my seniors and and for their feedback if my presentation or hosting skills are good I took knowledge from various articles and YouTube videos and in the fateful day I decided to test myself and I performed quite well I even received

    Band 6-7

    So, the decision, what I want to talk about here is regarding my college selection while I was searching colleges for my graduation in 2018, I gave state government entrance exam and I had various options of colleges to go for, whether I should go for government college, I should go for private college. So, government college has its own pros and cons, private college has its own pros and cons. So, for me to decide amongst the colleges, which college to go to was a very difficult decision because that would define my future. A good college provides very good development for your career and what your future will look like. So, I did the research about the colleges, what college would benefit me, I wrote down my personal interest, I prioritized the colleges and it took me a good amount of time. Approximately 2-3 weeks I took to research and then finalized the college and interestingly the college that I finalized was a state government college, Institute of Engineering and Technology Lucknow, which actually turned out to be a very good decision. I believe that that college made me whatever I am today, that college shaped my career, I am doing really good in my career and I would give a good share of appreciation to my college in building my personality, my career and actually shaping me what I am today.

    Band 6-7

    personality growth in my life I took decision to make people cut off from my life who don't respect me value me and fake people especially I don't make friends now I only make friends when I will trust them fully if they are trustworthy I tried them first if they can become my friends in reality or they will become fake friends so I try to maintain some distance from people I said colleagues is colleagues and relatives are relatives and I now I don't trust people easily this really helps me to grow in my life personally and I really see growth in my personality this decision has changed my life totally now I am a different person

    Band 6-7

    An important or difficult decision that I made was after my 12th class I choose fine arts as my career option. So I decided to take bachelor's degree in fine arts after my high school. I got 100 out of 100 marks in my painting as I choose an additional subject in my 12th class. After that I gained confidence and I was on seventh heaven when I got these marks. So I decided that I will made up my career and future in this in this fine arts course only. So I opted bachelor's of fine arts degree but it was a little confusing also for me and for my parents also as it was a new course for us.
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