Describe a City You Would Like to Visit
A Band 8 model answer for the IELTS Part 2 cue card about a city you want to visit, using future and conditional forms naturally, with Part 3 questions on tourism.
Cue Card
Describe a city you would like to visit.
You should say:
- which city it is
- how you know about it
- what you would do there
And explain why you want to visit this city.
This card is a grammar opportunity most candidates waste. Because the city is hypothetical, it lets you use conditionals and future forms all the way through, and examiners notice when a candidate handles those comfortably.
Avoid the cities everyone names. Paris, London, and New York invite a list of landmarks. The answer below picks somewhere less obvious and builds the whole thing around one specific reason.
Model Answer
Band 8The city I'd most like to visit is Valparaiso in Chile, which is not somewhere I'd heard of until about three years ago.
I came across it through a photographer whose work I follow. He'd spent a few months there documenting the hillside neighbourhoods, and the thing that caught me was that the city is built across about forty steep hills, so getting around involves these old funicular lifts from the nineteenth century. Some of them are still running and apparently they rattle alarmingly. Every wall seems to be painted, not with official murals but with whatever people decided to paint.
If I went, I'd want to stay for at least two weeks rather than a few days, because it looks like a place you'd have to walk badly and get lost in before it made any sense. I'd spend most of the time on foot, and I'd take the funiculars purely for the experience of them. I'd also want to go in their winter, oddly, since the photographs I liked most were taken in fog.
The reason I want to go is a bit specific. I grew up in a completely flat city on a grid, where you can see four streets ahead in every direction and there are no surprises. Valparaiso looks like the exact opposite of that, somewhere you turn a corner and the ground drops away. I suspect the reality involves a lot of exhausting climbing and I'd complain about it constantly. But I'd rather be somewhere that confuses me than somewhere I've already understood from the map.
Why This Answer Works
- Conditionals run through the whole answer naturally. If I went, I'd want, I'd spend, you'd have to. This is the grammar the card is designed to elicit and the speaker uses it without strain.
- The city is unusual and the reason is personal. Contrasting the hills with a flat grid city gives the answer a spine that no landmark list would provide.
- It predicts its own complaints. Saying the climbing would be exhausting and that they would complain about it is the kind of realistic hedge that makes an answer sound thought about rather than sold.
- The choice of winter and fog is a small, odd preference. Specific and slightly contrary details like this are what examiners remember after forty candidates.
Key Phrases to Steal
“the thing that caught me was”
Cleft structure for emphasis, delivered informally.
“they rattle alarmingly”
Adverb doing a lot of work. More precise than "they are a bit scary".
“a place you'd have to walk badly and get lost in”
Relative clause with a preposition at the end. Natural spoken English.
“the ground drops away”
Plain, physical description that creates an image quickly.
“somewhere I've already understood from the map”
Present perfect used to contrast known with unknown. Neat and compact.
Part 3 Follow-Up Questions
Why do people enjoy travelling to other countries?
The obvious answer is novelty, but I think the deeper appeal is that travelling suspends your ordinary identity for a while. At home you're someone with a job and a reputation and a set of habits, and abroad you're just a person walking around, which is oddly restful. There's also the fact that seeing how differently another society solves the same basic problems, housing, food, transport, tends to make your own arrangements look like choices rather than facts.
Does tourism benefit or harm local communities?
Both, usually at the same time and to different people. Tourism brings income and can preserve crafts and buildings that would otherwise disappear, since there's suddenly a reason to maintain them. It also drives up rents until the people who make the place worth visiting can't afford to live there. Venice is the standard example. What seems to determine which effect dominates is whether the money stays locally or leaves with an international hotel chain.
Will people travel less in the future?
Long distance leisure travel might well decline, either through carbon pricing or because attitudes shift, the way smoking did. What I doubt is that video calls will replace it, since remote meetings have been available for years and business travel came back anyway. There's something about physical presence that people keep paying for even when they don't need to, so I'd guess travel becomes less frequent and longer rather than disappearing.
Now Try It Out Loud
Reading a model answer is one thing — saying it under pressure is another. Practise this exact cue card with our AI examiner and get instant band-score feedback.