Describe a Famous Person You Admire
A Band 8 sample answer for the IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card about a famous person, plus why naming a less obvious figure scores better and the Part 3 follow-ups.
Cue Card
Describe a famous person you admire.
You should say:
- who the person is
- how you know about them
- what they have done
And explain why you admire this person.
Examiners hear the same handful of names all day: Elon Musk, Cristiano Ronaldo, Steve Jobs, occasionally Einstein. None of those choices lose you marks by themselves, but they do push you towards the same recycled sentences everyone else uses about vision and hard work.
The answer below picks someone less obvious and gets its marks from specifics rather than from the person being impressive. It also does something most candidates avoid: it says out loud what it does not admire about him.
Model Answer
Band 8I'd like to talk about Hans Rosling, who was a Swedish doctor and statistician. He died in 2017, and I only really discovered him afterwards, which I'm slightly annoyed about.
I came across him through one of his lectures, where he was explaining global population data using stacks of wooden blocks on a table. What struck me was that he was talking about extremely dry material, birth rates and income distribution, and yet I watched the whole thing without getting bored once. He had this habit of asking the audience a multiple choice question first, letting them get it wrong, and then showing them the actual figures. He used to point out that on some questions about world poverty, chimpanzees picking at random would score better than educated adults.
What he did, essentially, was spend decades arguing that most people carry a picture of the world that is about thirty years out of date. Not through ignorance exactly, more through never updating what they learned at school. He built free software so anyone could look at the data themselves rather than taking his word for it, which I think says a lot about him.
The reason I admire him is that he managed to correct people without insulting them, and that's genuinely rare. He'd show you that you were wrong and somehow you'd come away feeling curious instead of stupid. I will say his optimism could be a bit relentless, and I don't always buy that the numbers tell the whole story. But as a way of arguing in public, without contempt for the people who disagree with you, I haven't seen many better examples.
Why This Answer Works
- The choice itself does work. A statistician nobody expects immediately separates this answer from the twenty about footballers the examiner has heard this week.
- It contains a concrete image. The wooden blocks on a table and the chimpanzee comparison give the examiner something to picture, which is what makes an answer memorable rather than competent.
- It includes a criticism. Saying the optimism could be relentless shows genuine opinion rather than praise, and mixed views are much harder to memorise in advance.
- The bullet points are covered in order but never announced. Who he is, how the speaker knows about him, what he did, then why. The structure is there without a single "firstly" or "moving on to".
Key Phrases to Steal
“which I'm slightly annoyed about”
A small aside that adds personality. Real speech is full of these.
“I came across him through”
Natural phrasal verb for discovering something by chance.
“what struck me was that”
Cleft structure for emphasis. Shows syntactic range and buys thinking time.
“not through ignorance exactly, more through”
Self-correction mid-sentence. Examiners read this as fluency, not error.
“I don't always buy that”
Informal but precise way to signal partial disagreement.
Part 3 Follow-Up Questions
Why are people so interested in the lives of celebrities?
Part of it is straightforward escapism, I think. Following someone whose life is more dramatic than yours costs nothing and asks nothing of you. But there's also something older going on. Humans evolved in small groups where knowing about other people's status and relationships had real survival value, and celebrity culture probably hijacks that instinct. The difference now is that the people we track aren't in our village and will never know we exist, which strikes me as an odd arrangement.
Do famous people have a responsibility to be good role models?
I go back and forth on this. Nobody signs up for fame agreeing to raise other people's children, and it seems unfair to demand perfect behaviour from a musician because teenagers happen to listen to them. On the other hand, if you accept sponsorship money precisely because of your influence, it's hard to then claim you have none. So my position is roughly that the responsibility scales with how much you profit from the attention.
Has social media changed who becomes famous?
Enormously, and not entirely for the better. Fame used to require passing through some kind of gatekeeper, a studio or a publisher or a record label, which was gatekeeping but did filter for a minimum level of ability. Now the barrier is gone, which has let genuinely talented people reach audiences they'd never have found otherwise. It has also produced a category of person who is skilled at nothing except being watched. Both things are true at the same time.
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.