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Describe a time when you had a problem with using the computer: IELTS Speaking Cue Card

You should say

  • When did it happen?
  • Where did it happen?
  • What was the problem?
  • How did you solve the problem in the end?
Show all 118 answers

Cue 1:When did it happen?

  • Mention a specific time frame, such as a particular day or month, to give context to your experience.
  • Explain any relevant circumstances that led to the problem occurring at that time.

Example

It happened about three months ago, during the peak of my final exams. I was preparing for my computer science paper, and I had planned to complete my project that evening.

Cue 2:Where did it happen?

  • Describe the location where you were using the computer, such as your home, a library, or a friend's place.
  • Include details about the environment that might have contributed to the situation.

Example

I was at home, sitting at my study desk in my room. It was a quiet evening, and I had all my study materials spread out around me, creating a focused atmosphere.

Cue 3:What was the problem?

  • Clearly state the issue you faced with the computer, such as a software crash or hardware failure.
  • Explain how this problem affected your ability to complete your tasks.

Example

Suddenly, my computer froze while I was running a crucial software program for my project. I panicked because I hadn’t saved my work in a while, and I was worried about losing everything.

Cue 4:How did you solve the problem in the end?

  • Discuss the steps you took to resolve the issue, including any troubleshooting methods or help you sought.
  • Mention the outcome and what you learned from the experience.

Example

I took a deep breath and decided to restart my computer. Thankfully, when it rebooted, I found that the auto-recovery feature had saved my work. I also learned the importance of saving my work frequently and started using cloud storage for future projects.

Conclusion

    Example

    This experience taught me valuable lessons about technology and the importance of being prepared for unexpected issues. Now, I always make sure to back up my work regularly, which has made my study sessions much less stressful.

    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 Descriptions

    Using vague language can make your response unclear. Avoid general statements that do not provide specific details about the problem or the situation.

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    Tip

    Be specific about the time, place, and nature of the problem. Use clear examples to illustrate your experience.

    2: Ignoring the Cues

    Not addressing all the cues can lead to an incomplete answer. Each cue is designed to help structure your response effectively.

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    Tip

    Make sure to answer all the cues in order. This will help you stay organized and cover all important aspects of your experience.

    Lack of Problem-Solving Detail

    Failing to explain how you solved the problem can make your response less engaging. It's important to show your thought process and actions.

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    Tip

    Describe the steps you took to resolve the issue. Highlight any challenges you faced and how you overcame them to add depth to your answer.

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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.
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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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    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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    Anonymous student Band 7.5

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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 >7

    So the time I had a problem with my computer is at my fifth grade. So this was the first time that our family bought this computer and this is also an initial stage of developing the computer all over our households. The problem that I had with the computer is of turning on the computer. So this was the basic issue and I think you can see as a silly issue but for me as a completely new guy to computer I don't know about which one is the monitor, CPU, mouse or something like that. So that is the starting of stage of my life and I thought of plugging into it the power socket but it never started. I mean we should be clicking on the CPU right? So at that time I didn't know that and then I also had a trouble that none of my family members also knows about the computer as we are from the poor side of the family we never had a chance to work with computer and I had finally after trying many couple of times after reading manuals I finally have figured out how to turn on the computer and I also surfed into the computer after the excitement of turning it on and this was the one of the most memorable incident that has happened in my life with the computer and I think that made me feel like I could do whatever that I want in the computer. After that my computer had many issues but I have solved it myself and this was the first issue so it made me not to forget it.

    Band >7

    Well, now-a-day, computers play an essential role in both personal and professional life. Although they make tasks much easier, technical issues can still happen at any time. I would like to share a situation when I face a problem while using my computer for official work. It happened about 6 months ago when I was preparing a monthly medicine stock report under the National Health Mission. I had completed most of the work in Excel, but suddenly my laptop froze and then shut down unexpectedly. When I tried restarting it, the system would not boot properly. I was really worried because I had not saved the file on the pen drive or cloud storage. I called a local computer technician who came to check it. Fortunately, he was able to recover the data and fix the software issue within a few hours. I felt extremely relieved but also frustrated with myself for not backing up the file earlier. After that experience, I started regularly saving important documents on Google Drive. It taught me the importance of being prepared and using technology responsibly.

    Band 7

    This is an interesting one. So I was flying to the United States for the developer conference in Seattle and I was in the plane using my laptop to get some work done and build my slides for what I was going to present. So what started happening was that my IntelliJ idea started crashing and it was not indexing the code properly. So I was wondering as to what's going wrong. So I tried multiple different things, invalidated the caches and went ahead and checked as to what's the system usage like. Everything was looking okay, but multiple screens were still not working fine. So I thought as to what exactly could be the problem and I went ahead and debug more into the system logs and I checked that the battery life was going down day by day. So what I ended up doing next was I went on Stack Overflow, read multiple developer blogs around what might exactly be wrong and then started researching around it. And as and when I continued my research, I found out that my system had not been shut down for 20 days. And you know, like there's a simple command in Mac called as uptime. You get to know as to how much time your system has been running. So my system has been running for 34 days straight when I hadn't closed the laptop. And to be honest, I had never realized that I was not switching off my laptop because for most of the time, it's just me shutting the lid of the laptop. But eventually I figured it out that uptime is the one that's causing the real problem with IntelliJ not being able to invalidate the cache or the classic QuickTime player being not able to record the videos properly. So that was the root cause. I ultimately figured it out. I switched off my laptop, turned it on again and IntelliJ, QuickTime player, Firefox, VSCode, everything started working like a charm. So yeah, that was quite an interesting thing that happened to me.

    Band 7

    It happened about a year ago when I was working on a project for my studies. It happened at my home in my room where I have my desktop computer set up. The problem was that my computer suddenly froze and I could not access any of my files or programs. I was working on a critical project deadline and this sudden freeze was causing me a lot of stress. I tried restarting the computer but it did not work. To solve the problem, I first tried to identify the cause. I thought maybe it was a software issue so I tried booting the computer in safe mode but then that did not work. I suspected it might be a hardware problem. I checked the RAM and graphic card and it turned out that one of the RAM stick was loose. I reset the RAM stick and the computer started working fine again. I was relieved that I could meet my deadline without any further issues. In the end, I learned the importance of regularly checking my computer's hardware and software to prevent such issues. I also made sure to backup files regularly so I wouldn't lose any important data in case something like this happened again. This experience taught me to be more proactive in maintaining my computer and to troubleshoot problems systematically.

    Band 7

    One time I had a problem using a computer was during my final year research project on deep learning based human activity recognition. I was working on a 3D CNN LSTM model for classifying cricket and yoga poses. The model was quite complex and required a lot of GPU power and memory to train efficiently. One day I was sitting at home, while running a particularly large training batch, my lab laptop suddenly froze. I tried restarting it, but it kept crashing every time I re-ran the code. I realized that the system was simply not capable of handling the heavy computation it needed and I started to panic because the deadline for submitting was approaching quickly. To solve the issue, I looked into using cloud-based solutions. After some research, I decided to shift my training process to Google Colab Pro, which provided more GPU power and better memory management. It took me some time to set up the environment and upload my dataset again, but once I did, the model ran smoothly and produced much better results. Looking back, this experience taught me the importance of choosing the right computing resources for deep learning tasks. It also improved my problem-solving skills, especially when it came to adapting technical limitations. Now, whenever I start a new project, I plan ahead for hardware needs and explore cloud-based alternatives in advance.

    Band 7

    One time I had a serious problem using a computer was during my final school project submission last year. It was a very stressful experience because the deadline was approaching and I had spent weeks working on the assignment. The issue happened just a day before the submission. I was using my laptop to complete the final editing of my presentation and suddenly the screen froze and then went completely black. I tried restarting it several times but it wouldn't turn on properly. I believe it was a system crash due to the software error or maybe a virus. I panicked at first because I hadn't saved my latest work to any external drive or cloud. Luckily, I contacted a local technician immediately and he managed to recover my file using a special tool. He also reinstalled the operating system to fix the issue. It took several hours but thankfully I got my presentation back and submitted it just in time. This incident taught me a lesson about the importance of backup and regular system maintenance. Since then, I always save my work on Google Drive and keep my antivirus updated. Although it was a frustrating experience, it made me more responsible and tech savvy.

    Band 7

    This is something that happened to me while at my current role as a Financial Analyst. We are given a laptop by our office and it works pretty well most of the time. However, during last month there was an important project which had the deadline on the same day. And my laptop suddenly died. This has never happened before. So I did not give it much thought. I tried to charge it and switch it back on again. However, it did not switch on. I tried to consult a nearby store and asked him what the problem was. They took a look at the batteries and told me that the battery is not working and that it will take a lot of time to change it. I could not afford to waste time as I had to submit my work on the very same day. I came back home and when I talked to my brother who is an engineer, we came to know that the battery is not an issue. It is the charger that is not working. Without wasting a moment, I talked to all of my friends and tried to get a spare charger from them that would work on my laptop. However, I was unable to do that. But as it said, every dark cloud has a silver lining. I quickly put on my thinking cap and called one of my colleagues through my phone. And I guided him on how to complete the pending work on his laptop through my instructions. This resulted in me delivering the project on time and after a few days, a spare charger was provided to me by the company.

    Band 7

    I was in standard 10 preparing for my science project. I had to create a PowerPoint presentation on my project. The project was based on the topic thermodynamics. I completed the project but when it came to the point where I had to make my own presentation using a computer, I was confident that I could really do it but I was not that tech savvy during that time. So I started doing it and there it was. I wanted to create a really tempting PowerPoint presentation to impress the teacher but I got stuck in the middle. I asked my brother to help me out but it was quite shameful to ask my younger brother to teach me how to operate a computer but I knew learning can never be shameful at. I swallowed my pride and asked him to really teach me how to make an amazing presentation that could catch any reader's eye. He taught me how to use the various tools, AI to enhance the presentation and I could finally be able to complete it before the deadline and submit it to my teacher. Surprisingly everybody in my class loved the presentation especially my teacher who said that it was an outstanding presentation and it really stood out amongst everybody else.

    Band 6-7

    During my school time, when I was a kid, first I was introduced to computer with a monitor and a CPU and a mouse. I struggled a lot while functioning Microsoft Office and Paint software. First I was struggling in Excel how to make a sheet and what were the formulas to use for addition, multiplication, subtraction to complete a sheet. I struggled a lot while doing that but later on I found out that to use the computer on its full capacity, you can hire a mentor or a tuition to do with the basics to an advanced level. Once I read and gave exam of that, I become a pretty good computer operator. Then I realized while practicing that the more I will practice, the more better I can get. So, I practice every day since then and now my computer operating skills are pretty much good. Moreover, I am using now daily software which is more advanced and more practical. So, this was my thing when I used to struggle a lot during my childhood while using computer.

    Band 6-7

    After completing my graduation with the Maths subject, after that I appeared for the MC entrance exam. Luckily I got the 18th rank in All India and I got privileged to get admission in MA NIT Bhopal and that was the number one college in Madhya Pradesh. Then my computer journey started and at that time I was just zero in computer knowledge because I never operated computer, never seen computer. So it was really very difficult time for me to go through all the computer subjects, assignments. However, I have not lost my hope and my mother gave me full support. So she came from my home town and she stayed with me in the room. Then we decided to take some personal computer classes from institute and additionally I have enrolled for those computer classes and took some personal tuitions from home tutors and after three months I learned computer almost 80%. Therefore, I also got passed in all the subjects in the semester which were assigned to me in the first semester. It was really very great full time for me and my biggest achievement.
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