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Written by IELTS Mentor

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

Describe a game or sport you used to play in your childhood.

You should say:

• what type of game or sport it was
• how you played it
• who you played it with

and explain why you do not play it anymore.

Model Answer 1:
I spent my childhood in an urban area that was full of natural graces and wonders. The vast green fields, rivers, hill, the blue sky and the playmates of my childhoods were my best part of my lively and magical childhood. I used to play lots of games in my childhood and among them, Blind man's buff was one of my most favourite.

This game required minimum of 4-5 kids to play. Initially, one kid would be selected to be blindfolded and his/her eyes would be tied up so that s/he can't see anything. A big circle would be drawn and no one is allowed to go out of this circle. The blindfolded kid would try to catch someone while others would try to protect themselves but would not be able to go outside the circle. If the blindfolded kid can touch someone and can say his/her name, the blindfolded kid would get free and the other one who was touched would be blindfolded this time. This was the basic rules of the game and we used to play this game according to this rule.

I mostly played this game with my cousins, neighbouring kids and classmates. I was then around 4-5 years old and the other kids whom I used to play with were around the same age.

As I recall, I played this game when I was a kid if 4-5 years old. Probably I have not played this game after I was promoted to grade three. This was a game played by kids and in our country, this is played by the kids only. It is not at all a game for the grown-ups and I have never seen any adult person playing this game. So, I do not play this game anymore. Among the games, I play still now, includes cricket, football, badminton, table tennis but not the blind man's buff at all. This was a game for kids and I enjoyed this game as a kid.

Model Answer 2:
It is quite fun to think back to the games I used to play when I was little. I’m going to tell you about a particular game I used to play, how it was played and who with, and try and come up with an explanation as to why I don’t do it anymore when it was so much fun at the time!

I think the time when I played most games with friends was when I was at junior school; that would be up to the age of about ten or eleven. At morning and lunchtime breaks we were all turfed out of the school building to play outside whatever the weather, and that meant we played a lot of large group games. Some games are probably played in various ways the world over, chasing games like ‘tag’ for example, or a rather boisterous game we called British Bulldog which was eventually banned in our school for being too dangerous! That involved somebody being ‘it’ and everyone else rushing from one side of the playground to the other, ‘it’ meant being the catcher, and they had to somehow bring down as many people as they could, in whatever way they fancied, to stop them making it across the space. Anyone they floored in this way also became catchers, until everyone was ganging up against the few individuals left! There were a lot of bloody noses… Happy Days!  However, I digress, the game I want to tell you about is a bit different. It is called ‘conkers’ and we could only play it at a particular time of year.

In autumn, in England, horse chestnut trees produce seeds which are beautiful shiny spheres of deep chocolate colour, encased in a spikey green fleshy shell. The game consists of first gathering up suitable conkers from the ground where they have fallen off the trees. You have to select a robust-looking conker and then drill a hole in it using whatever sharp implement you have to hand that your parents don’t know about it! You then thread your conker onto a string or shoelace, with a large knot at the end to stop it falling off the thread. Next, you find an opponent, who has a similarly carefully selected conker on a string. One player holds their conker in front of them dangling on a thread, and the other tries to strike it with their own conker. Players take it in turns until one conker breaks, and the other is declared victorious. The winning conker becomes a ‘one-er’ after beating one conker, a ‘two-er’ after destroying two and so on. It also takes on the score of any other conkers it successfully breaks. Some games were friendly with your mates, others were much more challenging, when you had a really high scoring conker, other players would want to take you on to try and smash your now much-prized horse chestnut seed!

The game could get very competitive, and if I’m honest, a bit dangerous too, with small children furiously smashing each other’s conkers perilously close to each other’s faces and shards of shattered conker flying off in all directions! Some people would take the ‘game’ very seriously; tricks were employed to harden conkers. For example, you could ‘cheat’ by slowly baking a conker in an oven or soaking it in vinegar. Even so, there was real prestige attached to having a conker that survived many games, so the stakes were high!

I stopped playing conkers after I left junior school. This was probably partly because there weren’t horse chestnut trees to pass on the way to school anymore, this meant there were no more carpets of fallen conkers to choose from en route to the playground. However, it was also because at senior school it would have been seen as ‘babyish’ to play such games anymore, senior school students were far too cool and sophisticated to shriek with laughter as they smashed each other’s conkers on strings during break times! Writing this though has made me think that maybe this autumn I will find myself a conker and a willing friend, and see if we can have as much fun playing together as we used to as children. I suspect we will… though I fear we may also find we are even more furiously competitive than we were in childhood, still who says growing old means you have to grow up?!

[ Written by - Lucy Marris |  Careers Adviser (UK), TEFL teacher (Vietnam) ]

Sample Answer 3:
As a child, I wasn’t exactly a very physically fit person, and therefore, participating in any kind of sports – physically demanding sports - was among the least of my concerns or wishes. But, when it came to playing badminton, I somehow found it a bit easier to play than other “physically demanding” sports. 

But, please don’t get tempted to assume here that I was overly enthusiastic about playing badminton or I was really enjoying. Rather, I used to play this game once in a while (especially, during the wintertime) because one of my neighbourhood uncles used to offer me some delicious chocolate candies – chocolate candies that I really used to love as a child – as a “bribe” to play that sport with him, apparently because he couldn’t find any suitable partner to play badminton with him.

Of course, there was another “secret” reason (which I had never told to anybody up and until today) for me for playing that sport, and it was, as some of my “smart” school friends had told me, that playing badminton would make me taller. Now, for an average child with a rather “limited physical” ability, it was more than enough of a reason to play badminton as a child. But, still, I think that I, as a child with a weak physique, could take all the feelings of pride in hitting the shuttlecock with the racquet to the other half of the court, over the net, and scoring points. So, did I ever score 21 points to win a “game” against an adult? The answer is “no”, but I sure am glad that I was very close.

Anyway, I don’t play badminton anymore, primarily because I have become busier with my works and other things. Besides, as I have grown older, my taste and preferences in playing sports, like many other things in life, have changed. In other words, I enjoy playing other sports more than badminton like billiard and chess.
 

Your ability to talk about this Cue Card Topic would enable you to talk about the following Cue Card Topics as well:

1. Describe an activity from your childhood.
2. Describe something you did when you were a kid.
3. Describe something you enjoyed in your childhood.
4. Le Describe a common game in your country.
5. Describe something you used to do but you no longer do it.
6. Describe a memorable event from your childhood.

• IELTS Cue Card
• Candidate Task Card

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