Speaking Part 2 · ObjectsIn the Sep–Dec 2026 reported set
Describe a Challenging Technological Problem You Faced
In short
“Describe a Challenging Technological Problem You Faced” is a common IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card. You get 1 minute to prepare and should speak for 1–2 minutes, covering all four points below. This page gives you a Band 9 model answer, an idea map so you can make it your own, the Part 3 follow-up questions with answers, and the vocabulary examiners reward.
The task card
Describe a Challenging Technological Problem You Faced. You should say:
- •What the problem was
- •When it happened
- •How you solved it
- •And explain how you felt about the experience
Band 9 model answer
The problem I'll describe is one I caused entirely myself: I managed to lock myself out of my own email account, permanently as it turned out, about two years ago.
What happened was that I'd sensibly enabled two-factor authentication, and then equally sensibly changed phones and wiped the old one without moving the authenticator app across. So I had the password, which was never the issue, and no way at all of producing the six-digit code the system wanted. And the recovery email I'd set up years earlier pointed at an address I'd stopped using so long ago I couldn't remember the provider.
Solving it took about three weeks and, I should say honestly, was only partially successful. I went through the automated recovery process four times, each of which required a form asking when I'd created the account and who I'd emailed recently, and each of which was rejected without any explanation whatsoever, which was the most maddening part — no human, no reason, just a page saying it couldn't verify me. Eventually I got in via a laptop that happened to still have an active session, and the first thing I did was download everything and set up a new account properly. So I didn't so much solve it as escape it. I lost about ten years of archived mail that hadn't synced to that machine.
How I felt went from mildly irritated to genuinely quite shaken. The irritation was the first week. What replaced it was the realisation of how much I'd built on a foundation I didn't control — that account was the recovery route for my bank, my phone contract, essentially everything, and I'd never once thought about what happened if it disappeared. For about a fortnight I felt a kind of low-level vertigo about it.
There was also something specific about being judged by a system with no appeal. I could prove who I was to any human being in thirty seconds, and there was simply nobody to prove it to. That was a new experience and not a pleasant one.
What I did afterwards was fairly dull but worth saying: printed backup codes in an actual drawer, a password manager, and two recovery addresses I check. It cost me an afternoon. Given what the three weeks cost me, that's the part I should have done first.
Make it your own: three angles
Losing access to an account or data
Highly relatable and gives you a genuine emotional arc, which is what the fourth bullet needs. Also leads straight into the Part 3 questions about dependence on technology.
A device that failed at the worst moment
Good for narrative tension — an exam, a deadline, a flight. Keep the technical detail light and the consequences vivid.
Learning a system you found difficult
Works well if the problem was understanding rather than breakage, and it lets you talk about how you eventually got there.
What the examiner is listening for
Technical vocabulary is not what is being marked here, and a candidate who buries the story in jargon usually scores worse. Tell it as a narrative with a clear sequence, and make the fourth bullet about something more interesting than frustration — the model moves to a genuine realisation about dependence, which gives Part 3 somewhere to go.
Part 1 warm-up questions
- Are you good with technology?
- Who do you ask when a device stops working?
- Have you ever lost important files?
- Do you think devices are designed to be easy to use?
Part 3 follow-up questions & answers
Why do many people find technology difficult?
Often because it's designed by people who already understand it, so the assumptions are invisible to them. Error messages are written for engineers, and the underlying model — what a file is, what the cloud is — is never explained, so people learn sequences of taps without understanding what they're doing. That works fine until something goes wrong, at which point there's nothing to reason from.
Should schools teach children how to fix technical problems?
I'd say teaching them how things work matters more than teaching specific fixes, which go out of date almost immediately. If someone understands roughly what a network is or where their data actually lives, they can work out new problems. At the moment we produce people who are fluent users and completely helpless the moment the interface changes.
Do people rely too much on technology?
The reliance itself isn't the problem — we rely on electricity and plumbing without anyone objecting. What's different is the fragility and the concentration: a single account can be the key to someone's money, identity and communication at once, and there's often no offline fallback. So it's less that we depend on it and more that we've built the dependency with no redundancy.
How has technology changed the way people solve problems?
The first move is now searching rather than thinking, which is genuinely efficient for anything somebody else has already solved. The cost is that people are less practised at sitting with a problem they can't look up. I'd also say the quality of what you find has become the real skill — the information is abundant and the judgement about which of it to trust is the scarce part.
Is technology making life easier or more complicated?
Both, and it tends to trade one kind of difficulty for another. Tasks that used to take a day take minutes, which is a real gain. But it's added a layer of maintenance nobody had before — accounts, updates, passwords, subscriptions — and that admin work is invisible and never finished. On balance I'd say easier, but with considerably more small friction than the promise suggested.
Should older people be helped to use new technology?
Yes, and increasingly it isn't optional — banking, healthcare and government services are moving online, so someone who can't use them is excluded from things they're entitled to. The support that works tends to be patient and in person rather than a leaflet. I'd add that some responsibility sits with the designers, since a lot of interfaces are needlessly hostile to anyone who didn't grow up with them.
Useful vocabulary
| Word / phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| to be locked out of | to be unable to access an account |
| to back something up | to make a spare copy of data |
| to troubleshoot | to work out what is causing a fault |
| a workaround | a way around a problem you cannot fix |
| to crash | to stop working suddenly (of a device or program) |
| user-friendly | easy to use |
| to sync | to keep data matching across devices |
| a glitch | a small, temporary fault |
| redundancy | a spare system in case the main one fails |
| to be at your wits’ end | to be completely out of ideas |
More cue cards
Describe a Website or App You Use
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