Describe an App You Use Often
A Band 8 model answer for the IELTS Part 2 app cue card, showing how to describe software without sounding like a product review, plus Part 3 technology questions.
Cue Card
Describe an app or website you use often.
You should say:
- what it is
- how often you use it
- what you use it for
And explain why it is useful to you.
The risk on this card is that the answer turns into an advertisement. Candidates start listing features and the whole thing reads like a review, which is dull and uses very narrow language.
The stronger approach is to describe a habit rather than a product. The answer below picks a slightly unusual app and describes how it changed one specific behaviour.
Model Answer
Band 8The app I use most that isn't messaging is a plant identification one. You photograph a leaf and it tells you what the plant is, with a confidence percentage, and it's wrong often enough to be entertaining.
I got it about two years ago for a fairly trivial reason. I'd moved to a flat with a small garden that the previous tenant had planted, and I had no idea what any of it was, so I was pulling things out on the assumption they were weeds. I found out later I'd removed most of a rosemary bush.
I use it maybe three or four times a week now, mostly when I'm walking rather than in the garden. It's become a habit in a way I didn't expect. I'll be going somewhere ordinary, past the same fence I've passed for a year, and I'll stop and photograph something. Last month I discovered that a tree I'd walked under roughly four hundred times is a mulberry, and that it drops fruit that people apparently make jam from.
What makes it useful isn't really the identification, since I could have looked things up in a book. It's that it removed the friction. Looking something up in a book requires already caring enough to go home and search, and by then you've forgotten. Being able to answer the question in four seconds while standing there means I ask the question at all. I've ended up knowing a fair amount about the plants on my street, which is a hobby I did not choose and would never have predicted.
Why This Answer Works
- The app is unusual. Almost every candidate names a messaging app or a social platform, so a plant identifier immediately gives the examiner something new.
- The rosemary bush is a specific, self-deprecating detail. It explains the motivation and is far more memorable than saying the app is convenient.
- It makes a real argument about why the app matters, that removing friction changes whether you ask the question at all. That is analysis, not description, which is what the "why" bullet is for.
- It avoids feature listing entirely. There is no mention of the interface, the price, or the settings, and the answer is stronger for it.
Key Phrases to Steal
“wrong often enough to be entertaining”
Turns a flaw into a characterisation. Sounds like genuine use.
“for a fairly trivial reason”
Downplaying phrase that sets up an anecdote naturally.
“it removed the friction”
Precise, slightly technical noun used correctly in a plain sentence.
“roughly four hundred times”
An invented-sounding but plausible number makes the exaggeration land.
“a hobby I did not choose”
Compact relative clause that carries mild irony.
Part 3 Follow-Up Questions
Do apps make people's lives easier or more complicated?
Easier for individual tasks and more complicated in total, which is an odd combination. Every app does its own job better than the analogue version it replaced, but you now maintain forty accounts, forty sets of notifications, and forty places where your information sits. The individual gains are obvious and the aggregate cost is spread out, so people notice the first and not the second.
Should children be allowed to use smartphones?
At some age clearly yes, and the argument is really about which age and with what limits. A phone is how children now coordinate socially, so banning it entirely has a genuine cost that's easy to overlook. What I'd restrict is the specific design that's engineered to be hard to stop using, since a twelve year old has no realistic chance against systems built by teams who study attention professionally. So access to the device, yes. Unrestricted access to everything on it, no.
Will apps replace traditional ways of learning?
They'll replace some parts and leave others alone. Anything that's essentially drill, vocabulary, arithmetic, spaced repetition, is better on an app than in a classroom, because the app adapts to your errors and never gets bored. What doesn't transfer is the part where someone notices you've misunderstood something you didn't know you'd misunderstood, and asks the question that reveals it. That's most of what a good teacher does and I've yet to see software approach it.
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.