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Describe A Time When You Needed To Search For Information: IELTS Speaking Cue Card

You should say

  • What information did you need to search for?
  • When you search for it?
  • Where did you search for it?
  • And explain why you needed to search for it.
Show all 58 answers

Cue 1:What information did you need to search for?

  • Clearly state the specific information you were looking for, such as a topic or a problem you needed to solve.
  • Explain the context of why this information was important to you at that time.

Example

I needed to search for information about the best study materials for the IELTS exam. As I was planning to take the test in a few months, I wanted to ensure I had the right resources to prepare effectively.

Cue 2:When did you search for it?

  • Mention the timeframe when you started your search, including any relevant deadlines.
  • Describe any urgency you felt in finding this information.

Example

I started my search about three months before my IELTS exam date. I felt a bit anxious because I wanted to make sure I had enough time to study all the necessary materials before the test.

Cue 3:Where did you search for it?

  • Specify the platforms or resources you used to find the information, such as websites, libraries, or social media.
  • Mention if you consulted any friends or teachers for recommendations.

Example

I searched for information primarily on the internet, using websites like IELTS.org and various educational forums. I also asked my English teacher for advice on which books to use.

Cue 4:And explain why you needed to search for it.

  • Discuss your motivation for seeking this information, such as personal goals or academic requirements.
  • Highlight the importance of being well-prepared for the IELTS exam.

Example

I needed to search for this information because achieving a high score on the IELTS was crucial for my university application abroad. I wanted to ensure that I was well-prepared and confident on the exam day.

Conclusion

    Example

    In conclusion, searching for the right information was a vital step in my preparation for the IELTS exam. It helped me feel more confident and equipped to achieve my goals, demonstrating the importance of thorough research in any endeavor.

    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 are crucial for a strong response.

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    Tip

    Use specific examples and details to explain what information you searched for and why it was important.

    2: Lack of Structure

    Failing to organize your answer can lead to confusion. A clear structure helps convey your thoughts effectively.

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    Tip

    Follow the cue prompts in order: start with what you searched for, when, where, and then explain why.

    Overly Simple Language

    Using overly simple language can limit your ability to express your ideas fully. This may affect your score in fluency and coherence.

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    Tip

    Try to use a variety of vocabulary and sentence structures to make your response more engaging and sophisticated.

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    IELTS Cue Cards asked last week

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    Describe your favourite food at a traditional festival or a special event in your country
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    Anonymous student Band 7.5

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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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    Sector 34 Test Centre, Chandigarh

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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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    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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    Anonymous student Band 7

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    Begumpet Test Centre, Hyderabad

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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.
    Describe a book you recently read
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    Reported by

    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 6-7

    Okay, a time when I needed to search for an information was last week because I had an examination regarding black holes and it was a very elaborative extensive exam paper so my answers should be essays and not MCQs so I had to prepare for it by looking up in Wikipedia, YouTube channels and encyclopedias and also my notes from the classes that I had taken earlier that year so yes that's that. And I had to talk about it because black holes, I didn't understand it at the time and I still don't really but for the examination I had to look it up so I did look it up and I do know about black holes than I did earlier and I had to learn about Einstein's theory of relativity and time constant and about a lot of astronomy terms and I had to look it up in detail and I learned it using the Feynman technique and I explained it to myself and also to my mother to better understand the world view. I spoke to my professor about the black hole and I taught myself that in around three hours so I think that's pretty impressive considering the fact that I didn't know anything about it before and now I do. So if you have any doubts I think it's really great if you look it up on encyclopedias and chat GPT rather than just reading on it for hours on end.

    Band 6-7

    A time when I was required to search for information was when I was in my senior secondary school in 12th standard. So basically what happened was we had a subject called political science and the syllabus for our board exam had changed that year but our teacher was not aware of that. I told her that the syllabus is changed and the topic that you are teaching us will not be coming in the exam but he didn't listen to me then he was also confused and everybody in the class was very confused. So I decided to take the responsibility to search about the syllabus. I told the teacher that I will search everything. After that I came back home and I sat for like 3 hours straight and I gathered information about everything that what is going to come into the exam and which topics are deleted. I would also say that I am good at researching so that's why the responsibility was given to me. To sum it up I would say that I searched everything properly and I gave the information to the whole class and with that we were able to prepare for exams in a much better way because earlier we were studying things which were not going to come to exam and leaving the topics which were going to come.

    Band 6-7

    One month back, I got the ILTS score of a band around 7 and 6.5 in some of the modules. This mark is sufficient for skill assessment for Australia, however, getting more than 7 in all the modules will help me to gain some additional 10 points for my TR visa for Australia. So, I was looking to take a specific skill retake so that I don't have to reappear for the complete ILTS exam. When I looked for this option, I just came around some blogs and posts around this topic in the internet. However, I could not find anything useful that can be used for one skill retake for the Australian PR. Finally, I got to know that Australian PR under subclass 189 cannot accept this specific skill retake. So then, I was really depressed by that. I was really sad about that situation. Then, I tried to make me to appear for another ILTS full section test. That's where I am today.

    Band 6-7

    I need to search for a global scholarship program because I find that it has a great opportunity to continue my higher studies. So it was almost at the time after completing my undergraduate studies, I was actually looking for opportunities to help me find better place to continue my academic journey. So in order to fulfill that, I started searching for official websites including embassy programs that provide students with various scholarship programs and internship opportunities. And I found GKS, it's actually a scholarship program based on Indian and Korean government. It provides students with allowances, many allowances, transport facilities and free education by looking up to their academic background and the way they perform in the interview. So I find this to be a good way to, I find this option as a better way to proceed further and I looked up to in their official site provided by the Korean government and I find details about it so that I could apply it in an effective way.

    Band 6-7

    So, it was a final year project of my engineering. We had created a device that detected nearby locations who were helping out with COVID vaccines. At that time, it was in need of an hour. Pandemic hit the peak that was COVID. So, me and my friends made a health detecting device which was called as Arogya Setu app that detected the nearby center where the citizens of radius who stayed around 120 meters could go and get their slot for vaccination. To get this done, we have searched browsers, Safari and I have also taken help of few books which helped us to create this device scientifically. This device was done with the help of a 3D modeling plastic and was programmed with programming languages like Python and JavaScript. Also, it was integrated with IoT that is Internet of Things which helped us to gather the information of the society or the neighborhood. Once that was done, we had presented it to our HOD. He had approved our idea and the product. We presented the same for the seminar as well and it also worked fine.

    Band 6-7

    So, if I have to describe a time when I needed to search for an information, it was definitely when I had to apply to the colleges for my masters in management or marketing program. Currently also I am applying to multiple colleges as per their eligibility criteria and I have to go through a lot of research, so I had to search a lot of information about the colleges, their eligibility criteria as well as the placement reports. So, the one site I was using while searching for this information was Shiksha Study Abroad which helped me in getting the information about most of the colleges which were in my short listing. I would say 75% of my research was dependent on the Shiksha Study app itself and even still now I am using that same app to search for the colleges and the upcoming important notifications regarding the same as well.

    Band 6-7

    I remember that when I was in my internship during that time I was so scared about the different terminologies which are on my way. I remember that I was doing my bioinformatics training so I have to search about the different things and different terms and also about the different tools so I only heard about them but I don't know how to operate them so I do search many things on the internet that how it's work and how the output looks like of the data which are I having for my research work so it's that time that I have the scary experience but I do recommend everyone of us that we should do pre-research then our work

    Band 6-7

    We all need some sort of information in our daily life. I always go for information regarding anything that I am going to do or willing to perform it anywhere. I always wanted a sort of information about that particular thing for my better development. And I always go for searching in the internet like the internet search engines like Google, Chrome and etc etc. Even now a days there is an artificial intelligence named Gemini, ChargeBT are available to give us more information on the variety aspects or the different information that we need about anything in the current world. The technology is rising too much and we will get informed about everything that we need. The recent time that I searched for something was for preparing how to prepare for going to study abroad in Austria. And I always search it in ChargeBT for gathering the information about the visa process, for taking the IELTS and for the admission procedures and all. And it gives me a clear information about the admission procedures and as I said the ChargeBT recommends to me that I have to take the IELTS exam before I have to appear for the admission procedures. So these are the basic information.

    Band 6-7

    Well, recently, which I searched, it was related with my education, of course, because I've been working for around five years in a sales department. However, I realized like there's always a scope of improvement. So I thought of planning to pursue MBA from overseas universities, where I plan to check out the number of countries which provide the best MBA program, especially specialized in sales. And along with that, I started searching on Google and ChapGPT for.

    Band 6-7

    So to be honest, I use search engine for various information like if I have a doubt, if I don't know certain things, I just type over the search engine and know about the concept. So there was a specific time when I didn't knew a concept in stock market, so I do invest and trade a lot. So there was an article which I read that shows that now AI can be integrated to stock market and it is beneficial for traders. So I was curious about to know how this is possible because as a trader it would be very beneficial because for the research purpose we spend hours and hours because we need to read every article present in the news to come over an outcome. For example, to review a financial document of a company which consists of 100-200 pages, it takes like 3-4 hours to brief over it but AI can do the same thing within milliseconds which is unbelievable. After getting this info, I was shocked because I was doing hard work and with using AI, it is going to help me perform smart work which would be helping me get a better ROI. Although the AI subscription was chargeable but it is convenient to pay that much amount of money because at the end it is saving my much time than it used to be. So I would say that everyone should use AI with stock market.
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