Describe a Goal You Want to Achieve in the Future
A Band 8 model answer for the IELTS Part 2 goal cue card, using future forms and conditionals naturally, with Part 3 questions on ambition and planning.
Cue Card
Describe a goal you want to achieve in the future.
You should say:
- what the goal is
- when you decided on it
- what you are doing to achieve it
And explain why this goal is important to you.
Future cards reward candidates who can move between will, going to, hope to, and the conditional without thinking about it. That range is the main thing being tested here, and a goal you have actually started working on gives you the material to show it.
Pick something with visible steps. A vague ambition to be successful produces a vague answer, whereas a concrete goal comes with dates, obstacles, and things you have already done.
Model Answer
Band 8My goal is to be able to have a full conversation in Portuguese by the end of next year, which sounds modest but is going to be harder than it looks.
I decided on it about eight months ago, and the trigger was slightly humiliating. My partner's family is Brazilian and I sat through an entire dinner understanding maybe one word in thirty, smiling at things without knowing whether they were jokes. Somebody asked me a direct question and I had to have it translated. I remember thinking that this was going to be the shape of every family occasion for the next twenty years unless I changed something.
At the moment I'm doing three things. I've got a tutor online twice a week, which is the part that actually works. I listen to a Brazilian news podcast on my commute, and I understand perhaps forty percent of it now, up from almost nothing. The third thing is that I've asked my partner to speak to me only in Portuguese on Sundays, which we're both bad at keeping to because it's slower and we get impatient and switch back.
The reason it matters isn't the language itself, honestly. It's that at the moment I'm a person who sits quietly at those dinners, and everyone is very kind about it, and that kindness is precisely the problem. If I can hold a conversation I stop being a guest at my partner's family and start being part of it. That's what I'm actually working towards. The verbs are just how you get there.
Why This Answer Works
- Future forms are varied and correct throughout. Is going to be, will be, if I can hold, I'm working towards. That range is the point of the card.
- The trigger is a specific scene rather than a decision. Sitting through a dinner smiling at possible jokes gives the goal a cause the examiner can picture.
- It admits a plan is failing. The Sunday rule that neither of them keeps is a realistic detail that makes the rest of the plan more credible, not less.
- The final distinction, between the language and what the language is for, reframes the whole answer in three sentences. That is the reflective turn that separates Band 8 from Band 6.5.
Key Phrases to Steal
“which sounds modest but is going to be harder than it looks”
Concession plus future form in a single natural clause.
“the trigger was slightly humiliating”
Precise noun for a cause, with an honest adjective attached.
“up from almost nothing”
Compact way to express progress. Common in speech, rare in scripts.
“we're both bad at keeping to”
Phrasal verb with a gerund. Slightly informal and completely natural.
“that kindness is precisely the problem”
A small paradox stated plainly. Signals genuine thought.
Part 3 Follow-Up Questions
Do you think it is important for people to set goals?
Useful more than important, and mainly as a direction rather than a target. What goals do well is force a decision about what you're not going to do, since committing to one thing rules out others and most people avoid that. Where they go wrong is when the goal becomes so fixed that you keep pursuing it after your reasons have changed. I'd rather see people revisit their goals annually than pursue one heroically for a decade.
Why do many people fail to achieve their goals?
Usually because the goal was never converted into a schedule. Deciding to learn a language is a wish, whereas Tuesday at seven with a tutor is a plan, and only the second one survives contact with a busy week. The other common failure is choosing a goal for the identity rather than the activity. People who want to have written a book rather than to write tend not to finish, because the daily reality is nothing like the imagined result.
Are young people today more ambitious than previous generations?
Differently ambitious, I'd say, rather than more. Previous generations aimed at fairly standard markers, a house, a stable job, a pension, partly because those were achievable on an ordinary salary. A lot of that is now out of reach in major cities, so ambition has moved towards autonomy and interesting work instead. Whether that's a genuine change in values or just adapting to what's available is hard to separate, and I suspect it's mostly the second.
Now Try It Out Loud
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