Mat Clark – IELTS Speaking
27
One useful tip to remember about the Part One topics and questions is that they are
designed so that every candidate in any country has an equal opportunity to fully answer
ALL questions.
For example, you might be asked: ―What food is popular in your country?‖ or ―What
food do you like eating?‖ You will NOT be asked: ―How do you make Chinese dumplings?‖
or ―Do you prefer noodles or rice?‖
From the list of topics we can see that there are approximately 50 Part One topics
(and this list is increasing every year). If there are five possible questions for each Part One
topic then we can conclude that there are potentially 250+ questions in Part One.
This presents a problem. Most candidates prepare for their speaking test by preparing
―specific answers‖ for ―specific questions‖. It seems an almost impossible task to prepare
250+ answers. Even if this was possible, it would take an enormous effort and use up most
of a student's preparation time and energy.
Most people who prepare in this way focus on the ―content‖ of each answer and as
we have already seen, content does not increase your score. Within the content they may be
learning vocabulary for each question, but vocabulary only influences part of your score.
Also it would be very difficult to learn 250+ sets of vocabulary.
Obviously, this is not a realistic preparation method for Part One of the test. We need
to find an alternative way to effectively prepare for these topics and questions.
Most people are unaware that this huge list of topics and questions can actually be
broken down into sub-groups. By this, I mean the questions themselves not the topics.
Look at the following Part One topic/question frame.
