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Describe a piece of technology that you find difficult to use.: IELTS Speaking Cue Card

You should say

  • When did you get it?
  • What did you get it for?
  • How often do you use it?
  • How do you feel about it?
Show all 55 answers

Cue 1:When did you get it?

  • Mention the specific time or occasion when you acquired the technology.
  • Provide context about your initial excitement or need for the technology.

Example

I got my first smartphone about three years ago as a birthday gift from my parents. I was really excited because I wanted to stay connected with my friends and family more easily.

Cue 2:What did you get it for?

  • Explain the primary purpose you intended to use the technology for.
  • Share any specific features you were looking forward to using.

Example

I got it mainly for communication, social media, and to access the internet. I was particularly looking forward to using apps like WhatsApp and Instagram to share moments with my friends.

Cue 3:How often do you use it?

  • Discuss the frequency of your usage and any challenges you face.
  • Mention any specific tasks that you find particularly difficult.

Example

I try to use it daily, but I often struggle with navigating the settings and downloading new apps. Sometimes, I feel overwhelmed by the number of features available.

Cue 4:How do you feel about it?

  • Express your feelings about the technology, both positive and negative.
  • Share any frustration or satisfaction you experience while using it.

Example

Overall, I feel frustrated because I can't fully utilize its features. While I appreciate the connectivity it offers, the complexity makes me wish for something simpler.

Conclusion

  • Summarize your overall experience with the technology.
  • Reflect on whether you would recommend it to others or not.

Example

In conclusion, while my smartphone has great potential, my difficulties with it make me hesitant to recommend it to someone who isn't tech-savvy. I hope to learn more about it in the future.

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: Avoid Vague Responses

Being vague can lead to unclear answers. Candidates might not provide enough detail about the technology, making it hard for the examiner to understand their experience.

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Tip

Use specific examples and details about the technology, such as its features and your personal experiences with it.

2: Don't Rush Your Answer

Rushing can lead to incomplete thoughts and unclear communication. Candidates may skip important details or fail to express their feelings about the technology.

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Tip

Take a moment to think before speaking. Organize your thoughts and ensure you cover all the cues provided.

Avoid Overly Technical Language

Using too much technical jargon can confuse the examiner and detract from your overall message. It's important to communicate clearly.

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Tip

Explain the technology in simple terms and focus on your personal experience rather than technical specifications.

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IELTS Cue Cards asked last week

Reported by Leap students who gave IELTS

Describe your favourite food at a traditional festival or a special event in your country
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Reported by

Anonymous student Band 7.5

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Pitampura Test Centre, New Delhi

Answer

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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Reported by

Anonymous student Band 8

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Sector 34 Test Centre, Chandigarh

Answer

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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Reported by

Anonymous student Band 6.5

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Whitefield Test Center, Bengaluru

Answer

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.
Describe a time when your friend damaged something you owned
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Reported by

Anonymous student Band 7

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Begumpet Test Centre, Hyderabad

Answer

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.
Describe a book you recently read
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Reported by

Anonymous student Band 7.5

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CBD Belapur Test Centre, Navi Mumbai

Answer

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

I think one piece of technology that I find difficult to use is graphic tablet tablets which I buy because I want to try something new and I want to learn something new mainly about animations and graphic drawings but day by day it became very difficult to use and I don't know how to use that and even though it's very simple at first because it looked like very easy but it don't turn out to be much harder than I expected it's like the coordination then the drawing the main part of physical features is very difficult to draw I think I don't use it often because it's very hard to handle it I think more than twice in a month because every time I try I need a lot of patience sometimes the sending it's complicated and like pressure the sensitivity and all kind of drawing any features or any kind of expression is very difficult for me overall I feel a very mix of frustration and curiosity about the device on one hand it's definitely difficult for me to use and sometimes I don't know how to work with it very properly but I really want to learn how to use this piece of technology for my own skills and to enhance my skill I need to learn this so this type of technology it became very difficult for me to use

Band 6-7

The technology that I found difficult to use is quantum computing. This is a modern technology that developed during 1920. The main foundation was created by the discovery of Niels Bohr. He found that light can travel both as a particle and as a wave. So this discovery makes the further development. There are more researches in the coming later years happened in the field. And that forms the foundation of quantum computing. Nowadays we are using only 2 bits. But quantum computers use more than 2 bits. So there are lot of information can be passed within a certain limits of weight. That is the main advantage of quantum computing. The first time I heard the weight quantum computing was in a seminar conducted in my college. The seminar was presented by Dr. E.C.G. Sudarshan. He addressed all the future scopes of quantum computing. Which includes the cryptography. The field which secretly message can be sent. The other one is quantum tunnel in which electrons or small particles or micro particles can tunnel into the barriers. Even the physical barriers can be tunneled. Lot of applications for the technology. And the next one is teleportation which is very fascinating. But how it can be implemented that is really difficult. So I found it is very difficult to implement.

Band 6-7

Basically, I am an engineer, so I do not find it very difficult in doing any kind of technology. But there are a few applications which I find very cumbersome to work on. For example, there is one application called ETAP, which is Electrical Transit Analysis Program. In this program, one can do a load analysis on a power distribution network. I will tell about what is the power distribution network. So power distribution network is a network of electrical lines, transformers, and different kind of switchgears, which supplies power to our house. So basically, we can just extract the network and we can get it on the application. After getting this on the application, we can do a load flow analysis on that. With this load analysis, we get to know which feeders are oversized, which feeders are more on the load side. So after getting this one, we can do a projection. Projection is basically a type of analysis done on the network, so to get them more accurately networked. After getting this network, we can also do different kind of properties out there. So for example, there is one called Arc Hazard Analysis. Arc Hazard Analysis is the recommendation of personal protective equipments for person who are working on a high voltage engineering equipment, so that the person who is working on that equipment doesn't get harmed or doesn't get any hazard kind of thing. For example,

Band 6-7

hey once upon a time my mother asked me to do a course which is MS Excel obviously so first I thought that it is not something so big to do I mean first I thought it is not a big deal then I went into the Excel sheet after starting the work I begin to know that these things need formulas which I didn't know even how to do that so I got to know that I jumped into the wrong profession now I realized Hamza that you have jumped in this project now you have to complete it however you can so I moved to YouTube and I took help from here there and I learned some formula that helped me a lot to do my Excel sheet

Band 6-7

So, I got this software called Glow3D which is in my laptop. I installed it because I was curious if I can learn and make use of it in my daily life. Since I am from a fashion design background, a lot of people are using these advanced softwares to express themselves and technology is moving faster than ever and technology is also incorporated in a lot of sectors in our daily lives as well. So for me, it was important to learn Glow3D because I wanted to develop my own designs firstly on a software so I have an idea how it's gonna look like when it's gonna transform into a real life. So which is why I wanted to, that was the one reason that I wanted to learn, however I find it very difficult to use it because I am not somebody who likes to sit on a laptop and work. I prefer something more tactile, I prefer something which has more physical touch to it. So I never was encouraged to use this app even though I installed it about a month ago, I hardly have used it for more than twice and thrice and it's challenging for me because my laptop is also something, also old and it doesn't function very well. So it becomes very technical in terms of all these aspects are really stopping.

Band 6-7

Honestly, I have a very good grasping power and I am a very good learner. Previously, I always used to learn things faster and solve any problem with technology and I mostly used to explore a lot of things and work with it. Eventually, when I started joining, when I started my college, I was working on a lot of projects, especially web development or related to my field. I got introduced to this particular web application called GitHub and another one is called Git. These two web applications have been one of the most difficult tasks for me to work on. They are very complicated and they are on a higher level. Additionally, I had to take a lot of courses just so that I could understand that. And then apart from this, coding has been one of the challenging parts of my life. And I also got an opportunity to code a lot of web applications. Apart from that, I also happened to host a web application on a platform called Streamlet. That was hard as well because I had to merge Streamlet along with Git and GitHub, which is again difficult for me. And eventually I learned it, even though it took a while for me.

Band 6-7

The most difficult to use, sorry, okay so the technology that I would say that I find the most difficult to use would be my iPad. I only recently got my iPad because I really needed a device to attend my classes and to submit my assignments and even though I have a technical bent of mind and I haven't struggled with using such devices ever in my life, I have not been able to figure out how it's supposed to work. I feel that the user interface of my iPad is just too complicated, either that or I'm just not used to its user interface because I got it about a month ago. I think I need to spend some more time using it and then maybe I could feel better and more confident about its functions especially. When I try to take a screenshot, I just press the button and the iPad suddenly shuts off. I mean I had a tablet before, it was an Android tablet and the same buttons had the function that they could take a screenshot but the same buttons when I use it on my iPad, they don't take the screenshot but rather the iPad shuts off. So because of the different functions of very similar buttons, I get sort of confused and using my iPad becomes a complicated and a puzzling task for me.

Band 6-7

So, a technology that I find difficult to use is Apple M3 Laptop. Its rampancy has been incredible these years. So, last month I bought an M3 Laptop which was required for my undergraduate degree and it was authenticated by our college itself and we needed the laptop because of certain softwares to be programmed in our course and they taught us various languages also. So, I needed a high speed laptop. Therefore, someone suggested me to buy this one. So, I bought it and I found it very difficult to use because its features were very different from the other laptops which I used earlier. So, I was very awed as I bought it recently and it was a new thing for me. I was eager to open it and when I used it, its plethora of features which were available on the desktop were very difficult to use. So, I watched a tutorial from YouTube to how to update that technology and then finally I was able to use it and I find it an accomplishment to use new technology and I was very proud of it. I think they should make these computers a bit simpler for some old age people to use but I think its rampancy and its reason of flourishing is the high tech advancement features available in it.

Band 6-7

So, piece of technology that I find use, that I find difficult to use, is the PlayStation 5 console, or you can say remote that you use to play. It has got several features for each function, so it's a bit confusing to use it. Moreover, it has got distinctive features, two buttons as well on the top of the button which you can use to navigate through on the screen that is connected to your console. It's very specially designed so that everyone is able to use it, but particularly I'm still not able to find out how its keys work, as well as how it works properly. You know, if I would have to play a soccer game with my brother, it was a bit confusing for me, and he used to win all the matches, while I was, you know, kept losing all the time. So, it was a bit ambitious for me to learn this tool, that how should I use it, but definitely till now I have not figured out that how should I use it. Precisely, the main feature is that it has got many buttons that I can't even remember. It has got two parts, in which on the one section it has got four to five buttons with a controllable remote, or you can say a mouse on the top, and on the other section you have got various functions, so it is a bit confusing to use.

Band 6-7

I think myself as a tech guy so I don't think there is any piece of technology that is difficult for me to use. Furthermore if I have to point out something that would be an iMac. So from very young age I have been using Windows PC which is made by Microsoft and once upon a time when I visited my friend who is a music producer he had this expensive iMac which cost around two lakhs or so. The thing with iMac it looks so beautiful and clean and one day I went to his house I said can I use your iMac I have an interview with the University and as I was going to iMac that was probably the first time I used iMac in my life and I found out the keys were actually different. It is so different from using a Windows and I struggled so much and I had to also I have to call my friend he was not at home that time he said you can go inside I'll leave the keys outside so what happened was I had to literally call him to get into Microsoft Teams to attend the interview so I think that is the only piece of technology that I struggled with in my life other than that I'm a fully tech guy I'm the master of everything that's what I consider myself
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