Cue Card Sample

Cue Card # 256 - Describe a journey that took longer than you expected

Details: Written by IELTS Mentor

IELTS Speaking Part 2: IELTS Cue Card/ Candidate Task Card.

Describe a journey that took longer than you expected.

You should say:

when you took that journey
where you went
how you went there

and explain why it took longer than expected.

Model Answer 1:

One of the things, which I don’t really like, is a long journey. But, I don’t really control the roads or the flow of traffics on them. So, we can’t really help it if a journey takes longer than expected just as it did when I was travelling to my sister's house about a few months ago.

My sister, who is younger than me, lives in another town which is a bit far away from our house. In fact, in normal traffic and road conditions, it usually takes about 8 hours to reach her place. So, I don’t really like to travel to her by road unless I have a very valid reason to do so. So, I try to take the aerial route when I visit her. But, unfortunately, when my sister asked me about a few months ago to visit her in order to help her move to a different place because of her new job location, I couldn’t take any flight. In fact, I found that all the flight tickets were sold because some public holidays were being observed.

So, I didn’t have any other choice but to take a bus to reach my sister’s place. Initially, the bus was maintaining its regular speed, but after a while, it became slower and slower. I was growing more and more frustrated, but I couldn’t really do anything about it. So, I put my earphone in my ears and started to listen to some of my favourite music on my smartphone. At one point, I even fell asleep, and when I actually arrived at my destination, I was already late by at least a couple of hours.

Anyway, it took me longer than expected because the highway, I took, usually remains very busy most of the time. But, the situation got even worse, as far as the road traffic was concerned, since more than the usual number of people was travelling on that day because of public holidays. Besides, it was only a two-lane highway, as opposed to the 4-lane highway, which forced the traffic to run even slower. Naturally, as a result, my journey was longer than expected.

Model Answer 2:

The journey that I would like to talk about for this topic took almost 3-4 times more than we initially expected, and it happened more than two years ago.

I was in my 2nd year at my university at that time. After the semester break, one of our friends offered us to visit his hometown which was near a beautiful location with hills and rivers surrounding it. We were excited to visit there because it was a famous tourist spot and it had stunning beauty. Apart from that, we also wanted to enjoy our semester break by visiting a place where we had never been to.

My friend’s hometown was in (say the name of a place in your country). To reach there, one fine morning, we started our journey at around 7:30 am. It should have been a 6-7 hours' journey, and the first 2 hours went very well. We took a bus, and after 2 hours we noticed unusually heavy traffic in front of us. The bus was stuck in the same place for about an hour, and we heard that there was an accident that had primarily created the gridlock. After another 30 minutes or so, our bus started moving very slowly. The speed was not more than 20 km/hour, I guess, and we got bored being in such a bad situation.

The whole journey took around 22 hours(!), and we were very frustrated to be caught in such a critically bad position. When we reached our friend’s house, we were all tired and I wished I did not decide to make the journey! It was one of the most frustrating journeys that I have ever made. However, our experience at the place which was even more beautiful than we thought, somewhat eliminated our frustration and boredom of the journey.

Cue Card Sample

Cue Card # 256 - Describe a journey that took longer than you expected

Describe a journey that took longer than you expected.

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